Polygraph 22: Call for Papers

Polygraph 22—Call for Papers
http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/cfp22.html

Special Issue: Ecology and Ideology

The contemporary moment abounds with speculation concerning our ecological future. Specialists in a variety of fields forecast immanent catastrophe, stemming from a combination of climate change, fossil-fuel depletion, and consumer waste. The recent bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize on a group of scientists studying climate change indicates the degree to which "peace" has come to signify ecological balance; even the declaration by the Vatican of a new set of "7 Deadly Sins for the modern age" includes pollution in an attempt to grapple with the potential of individuals to inflict ecological damage on a global scale.

In the name of an impending crisis felt to be collectively shared, new political, cultural, and intellectual alignments are being forged, just as seismic shifts in the flow of global capital once again threaten to "redistribute" the world's resources and people. Ecological crisis has become a 24/7 media event, canvassing the planet in the imagery and rhetoric of disaster. From the halls of research and policy to activist documentary and apocalyptic fantasy, at the news desk, podium, pulpit, classroom, and computer monitor alike, all channels are united by a single underlying conviction: the present ecological catastrophe has humanity as its cause.

Precisely because the answer seems so obvious, we want to know: why now? Where are the points of antagonism in the midst of such apparent consensus, and what is at stake in their difference?

The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers concerning any aspect of ecology's relationship to ideology, both interrogating ecology as a location for critique of global capitalism and analyzing the ways in which ecology functions as an ideology in its own right.

Potential areas of interest include:

Political Ecology
Globalization and ecology
Marxism and ecology
"Environmental accounting" as a challenge to the free market
Ecology and capital / consumerism
Ecology as growth market

Eco-Disaster
Peak oil and climate change
Biofuels and the food crisis
Overpopulation and Neo-Malthusianism
Ecology as a rhetoric of control
Figurations of eco-disaster in popular culture

Religion and Ecology
Green apocalypticism and green evangelism
Ecology and world religion

Ecology and gender
Recent articulations of eco-feminism
Eco- & transnational feminisms
Women's work and the global chain of production
Agricultural work and reproduction

Ecologies against ecologies
"Light" vs. "dark green" environmentalism (i.e. deep ecology)
Primitivism and technofuturism
The status of international Green movements

Polygraph welcomes work from a variety of different disciplines, including critical geography, cultural anthropology, political economy, political theology, science studies, and systems theory. We also encourage the submission of a variety of formats and genres: i.e. field reports, surveys, interviews, photography, essays, etc.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
December 31, 2008

ISSUE EDITORS
Gerry Canavan
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
polygraph22cfp@gmail.com

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 past as anti-future

Our in-person discussion last week ended up on some interesting ground that bears heavily on the question of the end of the world as a cultural form. We found ourselves wrestling with the question of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy, why these sorts of productions are so very popular. We basically hit upon five overlapping and sometimes contradictory motivations:

1) The roller-coaster hypothesis: We are able to enjoy scenarios about radical destruction or the collapse of civilized society because we do not fear they will ever come to pass.

2) The survivalist hypothesis: We consume these scenarios precisely because we believe they will come to pass, because we know they must come to pass.

3) The recursive hypothesis: Apocalpytic fantasies succeed in the box office and the best-seller lists because these sorts of fantasies had succeeded in the past. In other words, consumer culture just keeps feeding us the forms that have already worked, over and over again.

I think this is probably at once the best and worst answer, as it explains Cloverfield better than anything else, but can't explain the genesis of our initial attraction to the form at all. Take this as a given—I won't be talking much about it.

4) The bare-life hypothesis: We enjoy apocalyptic fantasy because we have been primed by ideology to recognize the absence of civilization as a ultra-Hobbesian state of permaviolence and degradation, which is to say that the purpose of apocalpytic fantasy is to serve as reinforcement and justification for the biopolitical power structures that already exist.

5) The wish-fulfillment hypothesis: We persist in imagining the end of the world because we secretly (or not so secretly) long for the destruction of society in general and/or capitalism in particular.



I'm tempted to note here that #1 generally goes with #4, and #2 generally with #5—but I don't believe it's that simple. They're all inextricably bound up with one another. I'm happy to accept "overdetermination" as the answer to this argument, but not without qualification—I think we must acknowledge that Jameson is essentially right when he insists (following Bloch) on the Utopian kernel at the core of both cultural production and daily life. Without #5—without the carrot, whatever form it takes—apocalypse could never sell. There are plenty of places where Jameson says this, but I thought it might be useful (given that our discussion last week came to focus on what exactly is the Utopian hook in a movie like Saw IV) to look at Christopher Sharrett's well-known essay on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not all of it is available online, but a good portion of it is through Google Books, in particular the part I was hoping to quote:

The point to be made here is that the failure of America's sense of divinely ordained "mission," the development of pessimism and the fixation by many American artists on a nonregenerative apocalypse, suggests a kind of wish-fulfillment calling for an end to history, a divine intervention meant to destroy what cannot be revitalized or what has worked against the earlier collective (that is to say white, male, capitalist) beliefs of society.

What is the nature of this wish-fulfillment? Against Sharrett I would suggest that it is almost no different than the catastrophe of science fiction, or rather that it is of a piece with the tripartite possibility that is opened up by the end of the world. When we pass through societal collapse and find ourselves on the other side, three dialectically interrelated possibilities present themselves:

1) We are now free to rebuild capitalist society, but "right" this time. This sort of story inevitably involves a kind of jack-of-all-trades, Swiss-Family-Robinson, white, male, capitalist Übermensch with exactly the skillset necessary to rise to the equation and restart civilization.

We can see already that this narrative hits nearly all the points above—the latest in a long tradition of Robinson Crusoe stories (#3) that we simultaneously don't fear and yet always expect (#1 and #2), this type of post-apocalyptic fantasy both wipes clean the slate of capitalism's practical injustices (#5) while simultaneously justifying an idealized form of capitalism as the natural state of humankind and our only protection against a life of utter deprivation (#4).

You can usually tell you're in this kind of story when the story ends just as it looks like they're about to get the lights back on.

2) In a second variation on apocalpyse, we find ourselves in the state of nature, again as an Übermensch but this time as one finally empowered to fight and struggle and conquer completely freed from societal constraint. The collapse of society is equated with the collapse of all taboo, allowing us to "do whatever it takes to survive," which often just means murdering other people without compulsion, but sometimes also includes such psychoanalytic breaches as abandoning our wives to sleep with our daughters. The post-apocalyptic here is therefore bound up hopelessly with both nightmare (#4) and with wish-fulfillment (#5)—the one feeds into the other—but it is a nightmare that our identification with the hero allows us not only to survive, but on some level enjoy. (This, as I argued in our meeting last week, is the brilliance of High Rise—Ballard makes all his characters so unlikable that we are denied identification and left with just the nightmare.) Clearly, too, this is a thrill ride (#1) that positions us through the power of identification as the unbound survivor hero we all imagine we would be (#2)—we are able to experience at last (albeit vicariously) the total freedom we long for (#5 again).

3) But there is a third track, which might be called the "quiet end" for capitalism, and which in a kind of reverse synthesis leaves #1 and especially #4 out of the equation. While there is always deprivation and destruction, it is always downplayed in favor of a survivalist mentality that denies the capacities of the individual survival in favor of the collectivity of survivors. It is here, not surprising, that we find the Utopian kernel in its purest form, and likewise that we find renewed in these stories a new sense of history that extends far beyond the "Great Disaster" and its immediate aftermath. This is the longed-for apocalypticism of primitivism or of Earth Abides, a life free from capitalism's pressures and contradictions, a literal turning back of the clock. The past, then, not merely as anti-future, but as super-future.

In the most extreme of these fantasies, as in 2007's The World Without Us, there are no longer any people at all—a strange Utopia, yes, but an undeniable one.

The sheer incomprehensible violence required to ever get there from here—the massive, world-historical hardship that would have to be endured—makes these vision of an ahistorical future no less Edenic when they are presented to us, especially—and this may well be the key point—given the fact that the power of narrative identification always ensures our personal passage, no matter how improbable, through the crucible of Tribulation into a better world.

Arcology This, Arcology That

We're reading J.G. Ballard's High Rise this week, as well as some architectural manifestos, and we were hoping we would be able to include some of Paolo Soleri's arcological theories as well. Unfortunately, the sinister Duke library conspired against us, managing to lose every single one of his books—and so we turn, hats in hand, to the internets.

Proposed as an alternative to wasteful Western living and especially suburban sprawl, the arcology—an unimaginably immense structure with a huge population density that allows for "total living," an entire city in a single building—is clearly the premier Utopian architecture of our time. I want to draw particular attention to the intriguing dialectic centrally bound up with the imagination of the arcology: a vast supercity that is built in largely or totally undeveloped wilderness.



The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and the community. The complexification and miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources.

An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Today’s typical city devotes more than sixty percent of its land to roads and automobile services. Arcology eliminates the automobile from within the city. The multi-use nature of arcology design would put living, working and public spaces within easy reach of each other and walking would be the main form of transportation within the city.

An arcology’s direct proximity to uninhabited wilderness would provide the city dweller with constant immediate and low-impact access to rural space as well as allowing agriculture to be situated near the city, maximizing the logistical efficiency of food distribution systems. Arcology would use passive solar architectural techniques such as the apse effect, greenhouse architecture and garment architecture to reduce the energy usage of the city, especially in terms of heating, lighting and cooling. Overall, arcology seeks to embody a “Lean Alternative” to hyper consumption and wastefulness through more frugal, efficient and intelligent city design.

Arcology theory holds that this leanness is obtainable only via the miniaturization intrinsic to the Urban Effect, the complex interaction between diverse entities and organisms which mark healthy systems both in the natural world and in every successful and culturally significant city in history. —arcosanti.org

In combining ecological sustainability with an idealized, hyper-efficient supercity, in crafting a massive superstructure which one would never need to leave (and which therefore there is essentially nothing "outside") the arcology makes two Utopian moves: first, it relocates the imagination of ecotopia from the pastoral to a highly modern, highly technological space, and second it shrinks the national imaginary into a single city while at the same time shrinking the map of the city into a single building.

The world's best hope for a functioning arcology is Arcosanti, Arizona, which has been under construction for almost forty years: In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the high desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. When complete, Arcosanti will house 5000 people, demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. Its large, compact structures and large-scale solar greenhouses will occupy only 25 acres of a 4060 acre land preserve, keeping the natural countryside in close proximity to urban dwellers. Arcosanti is an open project—after just a short workshop, you can become a resident. (Ryan was actually there a few weeks ago, snooping around and taking pictures. I'll let him say more if he likes.)



Another candidate for world's first arcology could be the XSEED 4000, proposed to be the world's tallest structure at 13,000 feet, though it's stalled in the planning and financing stages. (This MetaFilter thread on XSEED from last year is actually where I first heard about arcology.)



So that's the Utopian dream, a dream of ecology and sustainability on the one hand and the usual classless egalitarianism on the other. In a day or so we'll start talking about this in connection with High Rise, in which this dream predictably and perhaps inevitably becomes a hell at precisely the moment when the delicate calibration of services and sustainability begins to breaks down...

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.

future of culture, future of utopia

While we put together our initial Utopia posts, allow me to briefly pass along Allen's recommendation of Jameson's recent "Future of Culture, Future of Utopia" lecture inaugurating the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, with audio hosted at Goodreads and some video at YouTube.