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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
I've found myself particular fascinated by this article on the subject of literary utopias:"During the Cold War - thanks to Stalinism and the success of such dystopian fables as Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World" and George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-Four" - all radical programs promising social transformation became suspect. Speaking for his fellow chastened liberals at a Partisan Review symposium in 1952, for example, the theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr dismissed what he called the utopianism of the 1930s as ''an adolescent embarrassment."
Niebuhr and other influential anti-utopians of mid-century - Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper - had a point. From Plato's ''Republic" to Thomas More's 1517 traveler's tale ''Utopia" (the title of which became a generic term), to the idealistic communism of Rousseau and other pre- and post-French Revolution thinkers, to Bellamy's ''Looking Backward" itself, utopian narratives have often shared a naive and unseemly eagerness to force square pegs into round holes via thought control and coercion. By the end of the 20th century, most utopian projects did look proto-totalitarian.
The question... is how to revive the spirit of utopia - the current enfeeblement of which, Jameson claims, ''saps our political options and tends to leave us all in the helpless position of passive accomplices and impotent handwringers"... Is the thought of a noncapitalist utopia even possible after Stalinism, after decades of anticommunist polemic on the part of brilliant and morally engaged intellectuals? Or are we all convinced, in a politically paralyzing way, that Margaret Thatcher had it right when she crowed that ''there is no alternative" to free-market capitalism?
Borrowing Sartre's slogan, coined after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, about being neither communist nor anticommunist but ''anti-anticommunist," Jameson suggests we give ''anti-anti-utopianism" a try."
It's a point that reminds me of Derrrida's Spectres of Marx, where the denial of alternative social structures, such as with Fukuyama's End of History, represented a denial of pluralism and democracy. For myself, when I think of Utopian narratives, I think of William Morris and News From Nowhere or Samuel Butler and Erewhon; while critiquing the existing state of society these authors also drew strength from a social context that believed human ingenuity was capable of refashioning itself in the most fundamental manners (whether through a benevolent alliance of technology and commerce or through completely overthrowing the existing state of things). Such an imagination was as evident in the works of Carlyle, Arnold, Fourier and Owen as it was in Marx and Engels.
By contrast, today tends to see evolutionary pyschology used as a means of suggesting that social arrangements (typically the sort of arrangements preferred by free-market conservatives) are literally hard-wired and not susceptible to any form of amendment or alteration; as the addage has it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to capitalism. Certainly, dystopian narratives that do depict such a calamity, such as those of Margaret Atwood continue to persist, while Houellebecq's extropian narrative in Platform is one of the few counter-examples that springs to mind (where genetic engineering resumes the sort of transformative character it held for HG Wells and his contemporary Fabians).
posted by Richard 8:05 pm
