Utopic Space

In the study of semiotics, utopic space is strictly defined as a space of transformation. For Gremias, in his example of making vegetable soup, the pot is the utopic space, the space where the transformation from raw to cooked occurs. Or, to pull a definition directly from Key Terms in Semiotics:

The term utopic space designates the space in which the decisive test takes place and where performances are realized. Utopic space is contrasted with paratopic space. In Zola’s Germinal, the mine Le Voreux where the miners fight their principal battle for survival constitutes the utopic space. In Cinderella, the ballroom where Cinderella encounters the prince constitutes the utopic space.

Artist Paul Laffoley—and his cult of internet followers—highlight the mystical side of this transformational space. In a press release for a 2001 exhibit, Laffoley describes utopic space as a “felt and lived sensibility” with a “generic religious base” stemming from its origination in the mind of the fervent devotee, Thomas More. He defines utopic space as a “multiplenum of an octave of spatiality and temporality in the form of total continuity”—basically, oneness. In this space, the possibility of “complete merger of content without any loss of noetic integrity” exists. Taking his cue from the futurists—a title he also bestows on himself in reference to his own corpus—Laffoley explains how utopic space results from the (eventual) congealing of all knowledge in what can be imagined as a state of pure transdisciplinarity. This has resonances with Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s conception of the Noosphere (a concept that proves particularly fruitful for Laffoley’s work) as:

the sphere of human consciousness or mental activity that grows out of the biosphere of the various species of creatures that exist on the surface of the earth, especially in relation to the force of evolution.

The noosphere becomes the convergence of all mental space. For Laffoley and his followers at work on the various internet spirituality forums, once utopic space is reached, once true transdisciplinarity is achieved, “we will all experience the end of the future.”



These types of ruminations are interesting for multiple reasons. As they appear rather symptomatically in web-based millenarism, they remind us how the project of utopia remains bound up (even in 2008) with the mystical; the pursuit of utopia is a kind of spiritual quest—perhaps the only spiritual quest—left to inhabitants of the secularized West. But more importantly, these speculations also direct us back to the question of transformation vis-à-vis utopia that came up in our recent conversation with FRJ; namely, must the human being be transformed before utopia can be actualized? And what type(s) of transformations must occur? Obviously, in the case of utopic space, we are well beyond a simple shift in the mode of production and have entered instead into some kind of freaky a-dimensionality (take that, Marx).



Another articulation of utopic space that is, perhaps, more useful (unless you really feel like going down the rabbit hole) is that it is the space of signification. In an essay on Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Steven E. Alford suggests, in a reading comparable to our thoughts on textual utopia, that “the space of signification is what we have traditionally called utopia, which is not a ‘nowhere’ but a ‘neither-here-no-there’.” In comparing the two utopias of More and Thoreau, Alford takes the Thoreauvian utopia to be the clue to utopic space:

The utopia of Walden clearly differs from those of More, and of Dark in City of Glass. In both Utopia and The New Babel, the quest is to build an external structure, that of an island or a huge building, and by reordering citizens' external relationship to space and property, destroy historical time and its attendant injustices through mandating an ultimately static space. Walden, by contrast, believes in the transformative inner power of the imagination—a change in our inner space will [a]ffect external space. Like Wordsworth's "Spots of Time" (themselves an interesting spatialization of temporality), the events narrated in Walden record the power of nature to transform the seer morally through affecting his/her imagination. The language of Walden becomes a second-order phenomenon that in turn affects the poet's readers.

Here, again, utopic space clearly emerges as a space of transformation, which, for Walden and Alford alike, does not exist in structuring built space but rather in the continual transformation of a space that remains forever flexible: the mind. It links us up again with Jameson’s take on textual utopia—that it is a continual production of mental space that acts as “enclave” within a system—and, to quote Louis Marin from Utopiques, jeux d’espace, the “no-place” of utopia emerges in the act of signification:

Utopia is thus the neutral moment of a difference, the space outside of place; it is a gap impossible either to inscribe on a geographic map or to assign to history. Its reality thus belongs to the order of the text; more precisely, it is the figurative representation that the text inscribes beneath its discourse, and by it (57).

the uses of more's utopia

How do we read Thomas More's Utopia? What is it? The progenitor of a new kind of fantasy escapism? A disguised political treatise? A philosophical inquiry into the power of reason to be the guiding force of society a la Plato's Republic? A satire on presumptuous local customs and prejudices in the vein of Swift's Gulliver's Travels? As it is in many ways the first of a quintessentially modern genre, we can understand it to contain in some measure all of the above, an uneasy (and so continually fascinating) hodgepodge of elements.

Early in Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson argues that the first "objective precondition" for utopia to be imagined is a social structure that permits the individual to believe that he or she holds a complete solution to fixing society's ills. In other words, an individual with a wide view of history who is prone to oversimplification: "the miseries and injustices thus visible must seem to shape and organize themselves around one specific ill or wrong" (12). A root of all evil that must be extracted. Jameson goes on to argue that unlike the pastoral or idyll, or in a different register, the liberal political theory of a Locke or Rawls, Utopia is not a positive vision of a happy society, nor does it include a positive set of proposals or criteria to build one. It has instead a negative, "diagnostic" focus, and any laws or policies it might include are only to be implemented after the fundamental source of societal evil is removed.

For More this evil was money and private property, and that focus Jameson argues runs through nearly all utopian literature to follow -- until the point at which money infuses all of social life, and the genre can only persist in its traditional form by imagining unconvincing replacements for money (i.e. labor tickets). In the Tudor England of More's time, money and enclosure, or the privatization of land and resources formerly held in common, had not yet become omnipresent. It coexisted with a waning autocratic feudalism, the mercantilist expansion of Spain and Portugal, pockets of monastic communalism, and more exotically, the newly discovered 'primitive' communalism of the New World, popularized by famed stealer-of-Columbus's thunder Amerigo Vespucci and his Four Voyages.


It was a transitional period, an interregnum before the modern era of revolution and reform for which England would experience the first birthing pangs. It was not yet possible for anyone to think of 'capitalism' as a world-system or even much of a local system. No current political or economic regime had attained obvious global dominance. The promises of religion and the attendant boasts of the various European powers to universality had the form of figural myth, prone to multiple conflicting interpretations. Though a 'total society' of the sort that would later become a popular target for dystopian criticism, less attention is paid to the ways in which Utopia is not completely determined -- there is freedom of religion (with the notable exception of atheism), limited working hours with most time devoted to "freedom and culture of the mind," and a chapter devoted to the crafty games of realpolitik Utopia plays with its less enlightened neighbors (such as using its store of gold to hire mercenaries and assassins). Indeed, Utopian society can be characterized as a basically pragmatic political structure designed to maximize individual pleasure and distribute it throughout a (supposedly) classless society, though with 'pleasure' defined according to a strict moral philosophy with religion at its core: "they seek support for this hedonistic philosophy from their religion, which is serious and strict, indeed, almost stern and forbidding" (54). The meaning of the Utopians' "good and honest pleasure" is fairly liberal, simply "a delight which does not injure others, which does not preclude a greater pleasure, and which is not followed by pain" (56-57). Though reproduction is heavily regulated, this includes bodily pleasure, the ideal form of which is health, or "the calm and harmonious state of the body" (59). When we juxtapose this humanist, moderated hedonism with the strict and thorough regulation the Utopians employ to uphold it -- the illegality of idleness, slavery as punishment for just about every crime -- we can begin to see the insufficiency of simple stereotypes like 'totalitarian,' 'communist,' 'liberal,' 'monastic,' etc. to understanding Utopia.

This is because, as mentioned earlier, More draws on elements from the many traditions he was familiar with (both ancient and contemporary) to construct this fictional society in an act of creative bricolage. Subtracting money and enclosure from the equation still left him with much to work with. We should keep in mind, for example, that More's moneyless, propertyless society was still colonialist. Indeed, as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues in The Origin of Capitalism and Empire of Capital, More was "the first major English writer to revive the ancient Roman concept of colonia to designate the settlement of foreign lands" (EoC 74), and England was the first European nation of the time to have suggested it (OoC 162). The argument is, in the words of More's character Hythloday, "The Utopians say it's perfectly justifiable to make war on people who leave their land idle and waste, yet forbid the use of it to others who, by the law of nature, ought to be supported from it" (More 45). We can perhaps trace this to the Utopians inordinate hatred of waste (wasted resources, wasted time, etc.), another trope used to justify violence and, yes, even enclosure in the capitalist era. Unlike capitalists and Marxists, the Utopians do not emphasize production or productivity, nor is anything like 'surplus' ever mentioned -- the rejection of excess goes both ways. Spiritual growth seems to demand material equilibrium (and this is not so different from the always-out-of-reach 'equilibrium' theorized/promised by economists since Adam Smith, or the often disastrous 'austerity' measures taken by various financial organizations supposedly to insure it). As Robert Adams refers to it, Utopia is "that strange blend of medieval discipline, humanist freedom, and practical bourgeois acquisitiveness."

Other ambiguities abound. Much effort is taken to portray Utopia not as static and unreachable, but as a living society capable of dialogue and cultural exchange with More's, especially (as one might expect) in its adoption of Christianity from foreign visitors. With a bit of conspiratorial service from his friends, much of More's audience was convinced his story was literally true at the time of the book's publication. Then there is the island of Utopia's crescent moon shape, and the fact that the fifty-four cities of Utopia match the fifty-four boroughs of London, suggesting that Utopia is simply an inversion of England. This tactic of representing Othered, foreign space as an imaginary double of England, culturally and physically set off from its surroundings as the British Isles are set off from the Continent, would become a common trope among English writers well beyond More's immediate imitators, examples including the Happy Valley of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and the kingdom of Ijaveo in Eliza Haywood's less well-known Adventures of Eovaai (1741). These pseudo-Oriental tales knowingly used foreign space to imaginatively work through (and conceal from censors) moral and political critiques of English society. Imaginary distance was a tool of critical distance, foreclosing absolute Otherness (all places must be legible to the educated English reader) through the cleverly chosen parallelisms that give the critique its bite.

Part of Utopia's lasting appeal is that it is impossible to tell what More 'really' believed or how 'serious' he was in writing this tale. Of the more recent interpreters, Karl Kautsky (1888) held that More was a proto-socialist, his 'communism' "modern in most of its tendencies, and unmodern in most of its expedients." For R.W. Chambers (1953), More presented a rationally ideal pagan society to encourage his Christian readers to reach their even higher spiritual ideal. Robert Elliott, in The Shape of Utopia (1963) writes the following:

"Two standards can be derived from within Utopia itself. The first is on the level of reform within existing institutions: laws to enforce the rebuilding of devastated farms and towns, the restriction of monopoly, provision of work for the idle, limitations on the power of the rich and the wealth of the king, etc. The second and higher standard is the ideal of the work itself, so to speak: Utopia, the model commonwealth, the only one worthy of the name. But if we go outside Utopia to think of Thomas More's ideal, we must think of one far higher yet. Father Surtz cites the appropriate passage. For More, the ultimate ideal would be 'the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God' (Revelation XXI, 2)."

Jameson also adopts, and furthers, this dialectical view of Utopia. There is creativity and ingenuity in the blueprint, the carefully thought-out details of the Utopian society, but every moment carries with it the force of the initial negation that makes the various laws and regulations possible: the negation of money and enclosure and the power they grant to sinful Pride, or as Jameson puts it, the three-part complex of Gold, Hierarchy, and Pride. For Jameson the the space of Utopia is "an imaginary enclave within real social space...a pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change" (AotF 15). It is a kind of laboratory emerging within times of uncertainty (the recent Utopian revival of which this series of posts is a part suggests the same of our time) where previously impossible connections, now 'allowed' because of the imaginary removal of some real obstruction (or is it real abstraction?), can be made and tested. The problem Jameson's analysis is formulated to solve is: how to imagine a world after or beyond capitalism at the moment of its apparent omnipresence?

This is the view of utopia that we will be wrestling with over the course of our postings here.
But I now wonder if the space of utopia, the space of an imaginative critique/experimental overcoming of the present, can itself be thought of as a positive goal or desire, the real 'content' of the utopian wish -- and whether or not the creation and preservation of this ideologically ambiguous space, from the diegetic plane of the text to the mind of its reader, is precisely what More means when he says "freedom and culture of the mind," stopping short of considering anything, good or ill, that might arise from it, or changing anything, good or ill, that might be going on outside it.

Which humanity has this form of freedom as its dream? What is necessary for its realization?

Week 0: Space, More's Utopia, and Time

Recent blogospheric polemicists have argued against a politics predicated on Utopia on the grounds (if I may summarize) that it is Utopia's very impossibility that is actually its most salient and essential characteristic:

Utopia: perfect, not meant to be found, impossible, hidden, veiled. It is perfect because it is the place where veils are unnecessary. No place for deception when everything is truth. And this is why it must always be displaced — the term ‘non-place’ suggests the absence of something that is always and essentially present to the speaker, the very conditions of speaking. Utopia as double negation, the (necessary) absence of an (impossible) absence.

I think this is largely right, but it elides somewhat the reason why: what has happened to Utopia since More published is that Utopia has shifted from a spatial concern—an actual place impossible to reach—to a temporal one—a possible future you won't live to see.

It's not simply that More, playfully insisting in the prefatory material it's all really true, locates his Utopia in the New World, a distant location well outside the horizon of experience for nearly everyone alive in his time; nor that someone coughs at the moment Raphael Hythloday reveals the island's exact location (as recounted in Busleyden's letter); nor that the sea is so unnavigable and dangerous around the island that "it seldom chances that any stranger, unless he be guided by a Utopian, can come into this haven" (first page of book 2). It is the inescapable nature of a spatial Utopia like More's, an Atlantis or a Shangri-La, to be actual and yet essentially unreachable—really, to be a kind of a parallel universe in an age when there was still room enough for them to exist on Earth itself.

Following More, however, Utopia has been relocated from a location in space to a moment in time—the future—and accordingly we have exchanged Utopia as a signifying noun for the Utopian, a metaphorizing adjective. Now Utopia is no longer actual—it doesn't yet exist—but it is reachable, at least in some theoretical sense;it is realizable through the actions of those individuals for whom it is still yet a dream. This potential reachability draws its logic not from the travelogue, as did More's Utopia, but instead from the religious promise of Christian eschatology of the Kingdom of Heaven (usually the substitution is as easy as replacing the Christian savior for a new one).

At the risk of splitting my hairs too finely, I'm speaking here of the difference between the alternative and the potential.

The move from a perfect place to a perfect time necessarily interjects the impossible questions of planning and transition that are objected to in the linked post. To get from England to Utopia (or from Earth-1 to Earth-2), you only have to know in which direction to sail; but to get from the present to ecotopia or the Singularity you have to plan—you have to build. Any Utopian project becomes quickly and hopelessly overrun with logistical impossibility, and accordingly the relevant imagined timeline becomes more and more prolonged:it's not going to be easy; it's a long hard slog; it's the struggle of a generation; it's a generational struggle; I may not get there with you, but I believe...



This is where the longing for apocalypse originates, in the desire for a radical break that does all the work for us at once.

But there's a dialectical countermovement to this longing for apocalypse. As change and progress become so slow as to resemble stasis, the long arm of the future and the impossibility of ever reaching it has a second and even more pernicious effect on the imagination of Utopia: in addition to voiding the Utopian of its political power and reducing it instead to the failed dreams of the naive for a "perfect world," it also respatializes Utopia, reinscribing it back inside the present. Our teleological view of history makes this happen. If the Utopian dream of tomorrow can be built out of the present moment, the future and the present begin to telescope, narratively, into a single, indistinguishable motion. If the warm-up pitch begets the pitch begets the swing begets the hit begets the arc of the ball over the infield begets the home run that is the end of history, then in a narrative sense they're all Utopia. To be anywhere along the path to Utopia is to already be as close to paradise on Earth as one could possibly be. Insofar as Utopia is impossible, the present is all we have, and insofar as it is inevitable, the present is still all we have. This is how Utopia becomes respatialized not as parallel world or impossible alternative but the nation as it currently exists—no longer over there but here, now, with ever-more empty and vague gestures towards progress or a better tomorrow. This, I think, is the genesis of American exceptionalism: the temporal potentiality of the city on the hill becomes confused with the nation's spatial actuality, and suddenly the possibility that we might be moving towards Utopia becomes proof we already live in it.