CHAPTER 1 Theorizing Utopia / Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century1

Lyman Tower Sargent

Utopianism, or the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a significantly different society than the one in which the dreamers live, lends itself to a wide variety of approaches. Utopianism includes what I have called its three faces, utopian litera-ture, utopian practice, including intentional communities, and utopian social the-ory. Leszek Kołakowski described how utopia expanded from simply being the name of a literary genre, writing,

It is an interesting cultural process whereby a word of which the history is well known and which emerged as an artificially concocted proper name has acquired, in the last two centuries, a sense so extended that it refers not only to a literary genre but to a way of thinking, to a mentality, to a philosophical attitude, and is being employed in depicting cultural phenomena going back into antiquity, far beyond the historical mo-ment of its invention. (131)

Given this situation, it is important to keep distinct things distinct. A specific issue is that both Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia (1936) and Paul Ricoeur in Lec-tures on Ideology and Utopia (1986) say that their uses of utopia do not apply to literary texts, but their concepts have frequently been applied to texts without any apparent awareness of the problems of doing so. While there is nothing in-herently wrong with migrating concepts from one context to another, they have to fit the new context, and if the originators of the concepts say they do not apply to the new context, it must be argued that it is appropriate to do so.

Although there may have been times without any of the three faces, I doubt if there was ever a time without utopianism since humans became conscious of themselves. There is a golden age on a Sumerian clay tablet from 2000 BCE, the first intentional communities were probably Hindu ashrams around 1500 BCE, and, while I have no idea when the first utopian social theory developed, it can be found in most ancient civilizations.

Recently there have been significant changes in all three faces, with the most far-reaching changes being in utopian practice and utopian social theory. One par-ticularly important change that effects all three faces is the recognition that utopi-

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anism is not, as Krishan Kumar argued, solely a product of Christianity (Utopia and Anti-Utopia 424n4). It is now clear that all three faces existed in other traditions well before contact with Western utopianism, which was itself as much a product of classical Greece and the Jewish tradition as of Christianity. Exposure to the spe-cific form of the utopia that developed in the West in response to Thomas More’s Utopia meant that this form was both adopted by and adapted to other traditions, but other forms had previously existed (see Dutton “ ‘Non-western’ utopian tradi-tions” and the chapter “Utopianism in Other Traditions” in Sargent Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction).

Utopian Literature Utopian literature has changed significantly in content because utopias always deal with both perennial and contemporary issues. Also, authors have invented variations on the form of the utopia that almost tempts me to agree with Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel and refuse to define the term (see their discussion in Manuel and Manuel 13), but that is not an acceptable solution to the variations in form.

More’s 1516 coinage of the word utopia and his own play with the word is where the problem begins. Utopia means no place or nowhere, but More wrote, in one of the standard translations,

The ancients called me Utopia or Nowhere because of my isolation. At present, how-ever, I am a rival of Plato’s Republic, perhaps even a victor over it. The reason is that what he has delineated in words I alone have exhibited in men and resources and laws of surpassing excellence. Deservedly ought I to be called by the name of Eutopia or Happy Land. (Complete Works 21, trans. Surtz)2

And although theorizing about utopia is quite old with the first scholarly book published in 1704 (Ahlefeld), after nearly 500 years there is no real agreement about what More thought he was doing or did when he wrote Utopia, but from the sixteenth century to the present the book has been the basis for what has be-come a complex, many-faceted legacy, and, as a result, our definitions of the genre need to be moveable with porous or permeable boundaries because defini-tions are rarely useful at the extremes (see Sargent “What is a Utopia?” for more on this point).

Other words were added to the utopian lexicon, most importantly, dystopia or bad place was coined, as far as is currently known, in 1747 with the next identified usage in 1782 and John Stuart Mill using it in a speech in Parliament in 1868. Much later anti-utopia was coined to describe utopias written in response to a particular utopia to show their flaws.3

14 THEORIZING UTOPIA / UTOPIANISM

anism is not, as Krishan Kumar argued, solely a product of Christianity (Utopia and Anti-Utopia 424n4). It is now clear that all three faces existed in other traditions well before contact with Western utopianism, which was itself as much a product of classical Greece and the Jewish tradition as of Christianity. Exposure to the spe-cific form of the utopia that developed in the West in response to Thomas More’s Utopia meant that this form was both adopted by and adapted to other traditions, but other forms had previously existed (see Dutton “ ‘Non-western’ utopian tradi-tions” and the chapter “Utopianism in Other Traditions” in Sargent Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction).

Utopian Literature Utopian literature has changed significantly in content because utopias always deal with both perennial and contemporary issues. Also, authors have invented variations on the form of the utopia that almost tempts me to agree with Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel and refuse to define the term (see their discussion in Manuel and Manuel 13), but that is not an acceptable solution to the variations in form.

More’s 1516 coinage of the word utopia and his own play with the word is where the problem begins. Utopia means no place or nowhere, but More wrote, in one of the standard translations,

The ancients called me Utopia or Nowhere because of my isolation. At present, how-ever, I am a rival of Plato’s Republic, perhaps even a victor over it. The reason is that what he has delineated in words I alone have exhibited in men and resources and laws of surpassing excellence. Deservedly ought I to be called by the name of Eutopia or Happy Land. (Complete Works 21, trans. Surtz)2

And although theorizing about utopia is quite old with the first scholarly book published in 1704 (Ahlefeld), after nearly 500 years there is no real agreement about what More thought he was doing or did when he wrote Utopia, but from the sixteenth century to the present the book has been the basis for what has be-come a complex, many-faceted legacy, and, as a result, our definitions of the genre need to be moveable with porous or permeable boundaries because defini-tions are rarely useful at the extremes (see Sargent “What is a Utopia?” for more on this point).

Other words were added to the utopian lexicon, most importantly, dystopia or bad place was coined, as far as is currently known, in 1747 with the next identified usage in 1782 and John Stuart Mill using it in a speech in Parliament in 1868. Much later anti-utopia was coined to describe utopias written in response to a particular utopia to show their flaws.3

Theorizing Utopia / Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century 15

In my 1994 “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” I briefly discussed uto-pia, eutopia, dystopia, the satirical utopia because one has to put Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) somewhere, the anti-utopia, and the critical utopia. Since then I have added the critical dystopia and the flawed utopia. The critical dystopia is based on the work of Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan and the flawed utopia, is based on my “The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia,’” which uses Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The One’s Who Walk Away from Omelas” as the model.

In “Revisited” and at greater length in “Utopian Traditions: Themes and Varia-tions” (2000), I discussed what I see as the two basic forms of utopian literature, which I first called body utopias or utopias of sensual gratification and city utopias or utopias of human contrivance and Lewis Mumford had earlier called “utopias of escape” and “utopias of reconstruction” (Mumford 15). I have always been a little uncomfortable with the body side of the body / city distinction and stopped using it, because, even though there is a strong thread in the city tradition that stresses control of the body and a strong thread in the body tradition that stresses gratify-ing the body, the distinction does not capture the richness of the two traditions. Also, city and body are now so mixed together that the distinction makes less sense than it once did. Therefore, I now use the more boring utopias brought about by nature or the gods and utopias of human contrivance.

There are a lot of utopias of both types being published today, many as POD (publication on demand) books or on the internet. While most are dystopias or utopias of human contrivance, the Left Behind series begins with an act of God and ends with the Second Coming, and there are both other God-given utopias and imitations trying to cash in on the immense popularity of the series.4 There are also some in which Nature is the driving force. But clearly most utopias and dystopias today are based on human action. The fact that dystopias are based on human action is also the basis for what I have always argued is their positive mes-sage; if humans can act in such a way that a dystopia will be produced, they can act in such a way that a dystopia will not be produced. Many, if not most, dysto-pias are warnings, jeremiads saying this is what will happen if you continue to mess up. The positive enclave in the critical dystopia brings the sub-genre closer to the form of the jeremiad because they always held out some small hope of a better future.

Authors are in the business of being creative and the subject matter of utopias has changed and changed again and proliferated and today many do not look like what we think of as the standard utopia. But I have come to the conclusion that they never did. More’s Utopia is a very complex little book which argues with it-self, undermines its own clear statements, and in the second edition is already re-flecting on the nature of the utopia, which was created in the first edition. Of course the utopia has a long pre-history, but perhaps the second edition of More’s

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Utopia can be called the first critical utopia, although that label might go as far back as Aristophanes, together with the label anti-utopia.

In “Revisited” I wrote, “Utopias (and intentional communities) are historical artifacts that are brought into being at particular times and places and usually by identifiable people whose reasons for doing so are in principle knowable” (6). While the idea of authorial intent is controversial, it exists, is important, and is at least in part knowable through the usual methods of scholarship. Obviously un-conscious creativity also exists as does authorial and editorial revision.

But you do not write a utopia without the intention of creating an imaginary or real space in which your characters or you act.5 Still, characters sometimes seem to have minds of their own and say and do things that the author did not ini-tially intend them to say and do. Every fiction author has some version of this, and every non-fiction author is conscious of some version of intent, unconscious crea-tivity, and authorial and editorial revision.5

Once a text is created it develops a life history of its own, outside its author’s control. Most utopias disappear at some time, or die in the sense that they are no longer living entities, if they ever were. Some utopias, like More’s Utopia or Ed-ward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), have something of an afterlife in the es-sentially non-political life of set texts, but they are really all dead. At times a dead utopia is rediscovered and given some life in a new context. Something of the sort happened to Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) when it was discovered by envi-ronmentalists, but this second life is rarely much of a life.

People committed to a perspective often go back to find precursors and give a text a flickering life. This obviously happened with feminist utopias, but none of the rediscovered feminist utopias were ever thought of as appropriate for the late twentieth century. They remained historical artifacts, not living texts. But the idea of the socialist, anarchist, communist, feminist, etc., etc. utopia does not die. Uto-pias die; utopianism does not die.

H.G. Wells, Judith Shklar, Elisabeth Hansot, and others have argued that clas-sical utopias, by which Wells means pre-Wells and Shklar and Hansot mean pre-Darwin and Marx, are relatively unchanging and that modern utopias are more dynamic (see Wells Modern Utopia; Shklar; and Hansot). While this possibly exag-gerates the situation in that both types have always been written and are still be-ing written, evolution clearly influenced the way some authors presented the pre-history of their utopias.

And from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, there appear to have been two breaks in the twentieth century. The first and most obvious being the rise of the dystopia, and the second beginning with the period that Tom Moy-

16 THEORIZING UTOPIA / UTOPIANISM

Utopia can be called the first critical utopia, although that label might go as far back as Aristophanes, together with the label anti-utopia.

In “Revisited” I wrote, “Utopias (and intentional communities) are historical artifacts that are brought into being at particular times and places and usually by identifiable people whose reasons for doing so are in principle knowable” (6). While the idea of authorial intent is controversial, it exists, is important, and is at least in part knowable through the usual methods of scholarship. Obviously un-conscious creativity also exists as does authorial and editorial revision.

But you do not write a utopia without the intention of creating an imaginary or real space in which your characters or you act.5 Still, characters sometimes seem to have minds of their own and say and do things that the author did not ini-tially intend them to say and do. Every fiction author has some version of this, and every non-fiction author is conscious of some version of intent, unconscious crea-tivity, and authorial and editorial revision.5

Once a text is created it develops a life history of its own, outside its author’s control. Most utopias disappear at some time, or die in the sense that they are no longer living entities, if they ever were. Some utopias, like More’s Utopia or Ed-ward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), have something of an afterlife in the es-sentially non-political life of set texts, but they are really all dead. At times a dead utopia is rediscovered and given some life in a new context. Something of the sort happened to Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) when it was discovered by envi-ronmentalists, but this second life is rarely much of a life.

People committed to a perspective often go back to find precursors and give a text a flickering life. This obviously happened with feminist utopias, but none of the rediscovered feminist utopias were ever thought of as appropriate for the late twentieth century. They remained historical artifacts, not living texts. But the idea of the socialist, anarchist, communist, feminist, etc., etc. utopia does not die. Uto-pias die; utopianism does not die.

H.G. Wells, Judith Shklar, Elisabeth Hansot, and others have argued that clas-sical utopias, by which Wells means pre-Wells and Shklar and Hansot mean pre-Darwin and Marx, are relatively unchanging and that modern utopias are more dynamic (see Wells Modern Utopia; Shklar; and Hansot). While this possibly exag-gerates the situation in that both types have always been written and are still be-ing written, evolution clearly influenced the way some authors presented the pre-history of their utopias.

And from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, there appear to have been two breaks in the twentieth century. The first and most obvious being the rise of the dystopia, and the second beginning with the period that Tom Moy-

Theorizing Utopia / Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century 17

lan identifies with the critical utopia (Demand the Impossible). While there have been critical utopias throughout the history of the genre, the moment in time that Moylan focuses on was a significant development in which the critical utopia be-came an important, seemingly new, development that revitalized utopian litera-ture. But as Moylan has argued in Scraps of the Untainted Sky and elsewhere, it did not stop there. It is what happened next that is interesting. Authors of utopias started playing with the form even more than the original authors of the critical utopias had, and Marge Piercy, one of the authors of a critical utopia produced He, She and It / The Body of Glass, which forced Moylan to come up with the con-cept of a “critical dystopia,” which has not been widely adopted (see Utopian Studies 5.2 [1994] for a number of essays devoted to He, She and It / The Body of Glass).

While there are a lot of simple, even simple-minded, utopias and dystopias published, the genre is now much more complex, open-ended, and multi-formed than ever before, although if you think of the inventiveness of Defoe, Holberg, Swift, and others, the first half of the eighteenth century looks as complex, opened-ended, and multi-formed as today. But the genre has always had many didactic utopias and simple extrapolative dystopias, and they continue to be pub-lished. But authors like Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia E. Butler, and Pat Cadigan, to mention just a few, have all written utopias, quite a few utopias where it is hard to say what they have in common, except that on at least one significant dimension they present non-existent good, bad, or good and bad places.

Utopian Practice Within utopian practice, intentional communities have changed significantly, with one of the most important changes dating back to the so-called Sixties when many deliberately temporary communities were established. Such communities and variants on them, such as protests, have come to be described as Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.), characterized as aspects of DiY (Do It Yourself) Cul-ture, or as aspects of the anarchist theory of organization (see Bey; McKay Sense-less Acts and DiY Culture; and Ward respectively).

The temporary, sometimes fleeting, nature of these activities bothers stu-dents of intentional communities, but to me they exist on a continuum which in-cludes many deliberately temporary intentional communities established primarily for political purposes. In the U.S., which is the situation I know best, these com-munities served a variety of purposes. Some were on an “underground railroad” modeled after the one that assisted slaves to escape to Canada and assisted draft resisters to do the same thing. Others served as “safe houses” for people involved in the antiwar movement who needed to avoid the attentions of the F.B.I. (see Piercy’s 1979 novel Vida). Many published an underground newspaper, organized