History vs. Utopia

Once upon a time, as I've said elsewhere, I was a socialist, and a "Marxian" if not a Marxist (the former indicating, not  a being from the planet Marx, but simply strong but not uncritical influence). In those days, this position was strongly associated with the idea of History (the upper case indicating that this was a special sort of abstraction). Indeed, in those days it was clear to we socialists that History was on our side, and this was a conviction built right in to the intellectual structure of the system. You can get a taste of this conviction from a passage like this, in Darko Suvin's overview of Science fiction:

When the industrial revolution becomes divorced from the democratic one [a way of putting the fact that capitalism has not given way to socialism] -- a divorce which is the fundamental political event of the bourgeois epoch -- activism becomes exasperated and leads to the demand for another epistemological and practical break, signalled by Blake's Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land and the cosmic "passionate attraction" of Fourier's phalansteries. Such imaginative energies converge in Marx, the great prefigurator of the imaginative shift still being consummated in our times.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 73-4 (emphasis added) 

It would never have done, of course, to admit that there might be elements of faith in such a conviction -- rather, it was always insisted that this historical bias or tendency was a matter of science, the science of history, aka dialectical materialism. But this was hardly the sort of politically disinterested science that is content to follow wherever research and observation points -- nor was it even politicized science. It was, from the beginning, a wholly political project that simply assumed or appropriated the mantle of science. And its notion of History, therefore, as a kind of force that constructs and controls the future was always merely the expression of a political desire or wish or dream.

Not unlike, ironically, the notion of Utopia. Except, of course, that Utopia is the wish or dream stripped bare, its cloak of "science" and inevitability torn away. Now, Suvin's remarks above were published sometime in 1979, before Thatcher and Reagan, and before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global disintegration of communism or "actually existing socialism". Since all that, the confident faith that we see in Suvin has certainly been tried, and in many cases has crumbled. And with that, it's not surprising, however pathetic, to see the former believers return to musing about Utopia again, sometimes, as we see in Jameson in 2005, with a kind frustrated defiance. Contrast the tone of the passage below with the blithe confidence of the Suvin passage above:

The relationship between Utopia and the political, as well as questions about the practical-political value of Utopian thinking and the identification between socialism and Utopia [!?], very much continue to be unresolved topics today, when Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a political slogan and a politically energizing perspective.

... What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational mediation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality,...

Archaeologies of the Future, pp. xi-xii

Transcendentalism and its appeal

Thoreau, Walden (order rearranged):

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can callreality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui,(27) below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer,(28) but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter,(29)and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

via Althouse 

And:

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses.(26) If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.

And:

 Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

Note the glimmers of a more mundane focus, though: "if we are alive, let us go about our business", or "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born" (even if "wise" isn't quite the right word -- it's the craving "only reality" that underlies his regret). 

What if we were in Utopia?

Would we know it? Can Utopia only be seen from the outside?

Quotes boingboing, from a 1935 issue of Popular Mechanics:

Imagine, if you can, the delight of the woman who steps into her "ready made" house and finds the kitchen already equipped with electric refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, electric or gas stove, built-in clock, abundant cupboard space--and even a two-day supply of groceries on the shelves. And she never will be bothered by cooking odors because an electric exhaust quickly removes smoke, dust and fumes from the kitchen. In addition to the windows, indirect lighting gives plenty of illumination for her work in the compactly designed room.

In the bathroom, this same housewife will find bathtub complete with shower and anti-splash curtain, the large basin that also may serve as the baby's bathtub, triple adjustable mirrors for her husband's morning shave and an extra electric heater for warming up the room quickly. The conditioned air issues from grills set into the wall near the floor and a built-in clock tells the "man of the house" just how long he has before his train or street car comes along.

 But forget trains or street cars -- now we all have cars, with radios that play Mozart in the morning. But, as a reminder that even Utopia still has flaws, there are the "walls of asbestos-cement".

The reified future

From J. D. Bernal, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" (1929):

The whole question is one largely of numbers, and would become entirely so as soon as the quantity and quality of population were controlled by authority. From one point of view the scientists would emerge as a new species and leave humanity behind; from another, humanity - the humanity that counts - might seem to change en bloc, leaving behind in a relatively primitive state those too stupid or too stubborn to change. The latter view suggests another biological analogy: there may not be room for both types in the same world and the old mechanism of extinction will come into play. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them. If, as we may well suppose, the colonization of space will have taken place or be taking place while these changes are occurring, it may offer a very convenient solution. Mankind - the old mankind - would be left in undisputed possession of the earth, to be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence. The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.

That prospect should please both sides: it should satisfy the scientists in their aspirations towards further knowledge and further experience, and the humanists in their looking for the good life on earth. But somehow it fails by the very virtue of its being a possible and probable solutions on the lines of our own knowledge. We do not really expect or want the probable; all, even the least religious, retain in their minds when they think of the future, an idea of the deus ex machina, of some transcendental, superhuman event which will, without their help, bring the universe to perfection or destruction. We want the future to be mysterious and full of supernatural power; and yet these very aspirations, so totally removed from the physical world, have built this material civilization and will go on building it into the future so long as there remains any relation between aspiration and action. But can we count on this? Or, rather, have we not here the criterion which will decide the direction of human development? We are on the point of being able to see the effects of our actions and their probable consequences in the future; we hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?

(emphasis added) 

Interesting to note that he classes "[man's] desires and fears, his imaginations and stupidities" under the Devil.

Note too the tight relationship between the notions of "science" and "the future"  (of which the making of both into opaque things is only a facet) -- as expressed here, they're co-dependent.

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Space/science/fiction/utopia

In the first place, we've seen that utopia needs the protection of fiction so as not to be merely sad. And we also know, of course, that utopia needs the protection of removal, either in space or time. And for these reasons, fiction that's removed in both senses -- i.e., fiction of the off-world future -- seems to have an inherently utopian element to it, as Jameson suggests, I think, in his Archeologies of the Future.

Along these lines, here's a wondrous site/sight, and a primary resource:  Atomic Rockets. Filled with facts, possibilities, calculators, links, and images -- e.g.:

That graphic was used for the end pages of a series of juvenile (these days "young adult") science fiction books published in the 1950's, and though it might seem innocuous enough now, then it inspired awe, nervous excitement (as did Gort the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still) , and a sense of a wondrously open possibility in stark contrast to the banality of everyday waking life. A sense that, when you think about it, is a principle characteristic of utopias of all sorts, is it not?

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Space and utopia

Curious that more hasn't been made of that connection -- space as in "outer space" as a venue for utopia. There's Robinson's Mars trilogy, of course, and there's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but what else? The Soviet-era Andromeda hardly counts, since it makes no real use of space, and the same point rules out LeGuin's The Dispossessed, though both are certainly utopian. The point of space as a utopian locale is that, like any frontier, it represents the possibility of making a "fresh start", a possibility that the Mars trology exploits quite openly, and that Heinlein's novel obviously uses as well. In that sense, there might be a few other Heinlein books that are fringe utopian candidates as well, such as Farmer in the Sky, which (as best I can recall) does use the idea of creating a new society. And, for that matter, that's part of the appeal of apocalyptic fiction too, no? The idea that, having cleared out the social/cultural/political deadwood, we now have a chance to start over and do it right. But in general, though it's common enough to locate utopia in far off islands or lost valleys, and very common to locate it in the future, we don't often see them in space.

Well, but then I remember the spate of non-fiction books like Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier, or T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, certainly utopian tracts if they're anything -- e.g., the prominent blurb on the O'Neill cover: "Space colonies -- hope for your future", and on Heppenheimer's: "Take an expedition to dream cities in the stars!".

     

Something sad in those blurbs, isn't there? Not just their earnest naivete, or, more likely, their blatant hucksterism in attempting to appeal to people desperate for hope and dreams, but also, now, in their obvious failure. In all that, though, they're not unlike the architectural utopianism of modernism, as in Le Corbusier's "ville radieuse" or Hugh Ferriss' Metropolis of Tomorrow.

This too now just seems dated and silly, as, sadly, Metropolis itself does. Still, the point of fictionalizing utopia may well be to protect it from reality's dash of cold water.


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3011 AD

The 1000-year future  -- pop: 10 trillion. That's trillion.

This began as a thought experiment to do with the so-called "carrying capacity" of the earth, which is supposed to be strained or exceeded  at current levels of population. Consider 3 orders of magnitude:

• First, look back some 8000 years, at a global population 1/1000 of today's, or about 10 million human beings -- some roaming bands, some fishers, some early farmers perhaps, all starting to crowd against one another. An early population crisis, as the earth approaches its carrying capacity for Neolithic cultures.
• Then look ahead 1000 years, say, and consider a population 1000 times as large as our current.
• A single super-city covering a substantial portion of the ocean surface area, as well as extensive underground capacity. (If the ocean city floated or extended below sea-level, it would displace enough water to possibly drown the continents, to avoid which would need supports.)
• Would also need a belt of equator-girdling space elevators to move excess population off planet in mass numbers, to enable population growth generally while keeping a steady-state population level on earth, finally.
• Also need radiator vanes (connected to space elevators?) to dump waste heat?

Think of a classic Utopian narrative -- the sleepers awake, 1000 years hence. Or perhaps they're artificial constructs, in cloned bodies, with memories and selves built out of fragments from the past -- something they only learn at the climax.


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On the ambiguity of the anti-utopians

Berdiaff (or Berdyaev -- see p. 122) again:

The opponents of socialism say that socialism is a utopia and that it flies in the face of human nature. There is some ambiguity in this. It is not clear whether they do not want socialism on the ground that it is unrealizable, utopian, and a mere dream, or whether it is unrealizable because they do not want it and do everything in their power to hinder it and prevent it coming into being.

A good point, no? You might try to resolve the ambiguity by saying that what the anti-utopians struggle to prevent isn't the idealized but impossible utopia, but rather the all too possible attempt at utopia, which always turns dream into nightmare. But I don't think that's really Berdiaff's point -- nor Huxley's, at least in his Brave New World phase. No, their point is that the dream and the nightmare are really one and the same thing, the same social entity, simply seen from different perspectives....


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The epigraph to Brave New World

Utopias seem to be much more realizable than we formerly believed them to be. Now we find ourselves presented with another alarming question: how do we prevent their definitive realization? …Utopias are realizable. Life marches toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of ways to evict utopias and return to a non-utopic society, less “perfect” and more free.”

Nicolas Berdiaff 

The source is a Russian writer (whose name is variously transliterated, often as Berdyaev), once a Marxist,   then a Christian existentialist theologian. The particular work is a French translation translated again into English under the titles of both The New Middle Ages (1924) and then as The End of Our Time (1933). Right in the midst of the great utopian "realizations" of the first half of the last century (The horror! The horror!) .

And so here we are now, a new century begun....


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The antique future

It's not this:

That was the 50's, a couple of generations or more past (though of course the 50's generate their own notion of the antique). But here's the future now, pre-aged:

Ian McQue, Shore Leave

Or this:

McQue, The Last Airborne

A rusty, old future, in other words, rather than shiny and new -- and no rectilinear grid lines disappearing to a perspectivist vanishing point. But this clearly has an appeal all its own -- note the enduring interest in Blade Runner. It's related, at least, to the appeal of punk, and to its cyber- and steam- variations. Related also to the appeal of ruins as such -- the sense of great depths, possibilities, mysteries, beneath the broken surfaces, the sense even of time itself made a visible, tangible presence -- but in this case still with that imagination-teasing added dimension of the future.

There's no escaping the appeal of decadence as well, however, and the indulgent sentimentalism that carries with it.  Note how that fits so well with the theme of Conspiracy, both benign and malignant -- the sense of vast, inherently incomprehensible social totalities, with a few outsiders fitting into its interstices, both preying and preyed upon (in contrast to the rectilinear, Utopian future of the 50's). Gibson, of course, but Pynchon too. And caverns measureless to man....


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Hugh Ferriss and "the vertical sublime"

From the nonist -- "Verticles on wide avenues":



The caption reads:

Verticals On Wide Avenues by Hugh Ferriss. From the post Hugh Ferriss: Delineator of Gotham, Or: Rendering “The Vertical Sublime” which features images from the preeminent architectural draftsman’s 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow.

Here's "Technology":



"The science center":




Which came first, I wonder -- Hugh Ferriss or Metropolis?

And again, the rectilinear, this time with perspective in order to awe with space or scale.

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"The opaque civilization"

That's the name of an exhibition at the Guggenheim back in 1984, by a "theoretical" architect named Will Insley. From the review in the NYTimes:

''ONECITY,'' the chief project in the show, has, the artist says, ''very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present'' or with the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''

An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square, symbolized by a floor plan that paces off at about 30 feet, it is ''situated'' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an ''Over-building'' and an ''Under-building'' and each containing nine arenas. Like the ''Star Trek'' scripts, the artist omits the logistical nuts and bolts, making paraphrase difficult.

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they ''mutter a lot'' and ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.'' And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.

Alluding to New Yorkers' apparent obliviousness to bag ladies, Insley makes plain that while he himself may be without morals, his fantasy is replete with them as well as with ironic wit. Criminals, by the way, are sequestered in the ninth arena (Dante's?), where they are free to do what they will, including playing team sports like football.

Here's an example taken from the BLDGBLOG:



Which goes on to say:

Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’"

And finishes:

ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.

More images, expandable, are available at the nonist (a moribund blog/site).

Intrigued by the gridlines particularly -- the rectilinear characteristic of the architectural/engineering drawing, of the blueprint, the draught. These are not maps, partly in that they have a different purpose, partly in that they refer always to the made, the consciously willed, as opposed to the so-called "natural". But, like maps, they are a representation of information. (Contrast maps/blueprints with knowledge of any kind, which is not a representation of anything.)

With the Game, looking to fuse various forms of visual information, including both map-type and blueprint-type. Interesting to think of being able to adopt different forms or instances of forms as one would put on clothes....

Think too of the idea of an imaginary architecture overlaid on a real city -- an imaginary complete with imaginary denizens, like "day people" and "night people". Overlaid, themselves, on the real people? "Unreal city", mythical city, ....

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Utopia and Conspiracy

Think of these as inverses, but related. Think of one being embedded in the other -- Conspiracy as being contained within Utopia, e.g. And then think of the inverse, or of the embedding turned inside out  -- Utopia contained within Conspiracy.

Think of twin narratives, or narrative layers. But what's the Utopian equivalent of Conspiracy's "revelation"? "Realization"? Or is there a Utopian revelation as well -- "Revelation" as the encompassing theme?

Well, that must be the case, given the Inversion -- Utopia's revelation the more profound, in other words.

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What this is about

Some themes:

• Utopia, of course
• Which includes Dystopia
• and which includes all other bullet points
• and contains an inherent ambiguity:
• on the one hand, the impossibility of utopia and the folly/evil of utopian attempts
• on the other, the Nozick/Rand utopia
• and on the third hand, the imaginative reach for a New People (see Cherneyshevsky, Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, even possibly Pynchon, and see the Inversion theme below)

• Conspiracy -- the concept, as distinct from the plot (see Art-narrative below)

• The inversion and its consequences
• Epistemological ontology -- this is the central idea (if Utopia stands for the encompassing idea, this is the core): that what is is determined by what's known, not the other way around (and "what's known" is determined by what works -- i.e., a relational as opposed to a representational epistemology)
• "Inversion" describes the switch from let's say a "realist" ontology to the epistemological ontology noted above -- that is, from reality being something out there that we can only painstakingly discover to reality being, literally, right before our eyes (and nose, and ears, and touch, etc.)

• Art
• and religion
• and Utopia
• and narrative
• Elementory
• Conspiracy as plot (see below)
• The plot, as distinct from the concept (see above)
• the notion of "revelation" 
• as distinct from "epiphany" -- i.e., it's exogenous
• also as distinct from "solution" (of a mystery) -- this is a change in your understanding of the world
• A multipart series (say, 5) -- larger revelations at the climax of each?
• Space fiction
• 3000 AD (the 1000-year future)
• The Utopia Project itself
• architecture/urban design/planning
• The game
• of Utopia
• board/screen design
• layers
• fractal depth
• and the social network
• avatars

• Space colonization
• and utopia
• Getting off the planet
• the moon
• Mars
• Open space
• Commercializing space

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