The Polyphony of Utopia

The question one must address to such a work […] turns on the status of the negative in what is given as an effort to imagine a world without negativity. The repression of the negative, the place of that repression, will then allow us to formulate the essential contradiction of such texts, […] as the dialectical reversal of intent, the inversion of representation, the ‘ruse of history’ whereby the effort to imagine utopia ends up betraying the impossibility of doing so. The content of such repressed ‘semes’ of negativity will then serve as an indicator of the ways in which a narrative’s contradiction or antinomy is to be formulated and reconstructed.

Fredric Jameson, ‘Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?’

It is the spirit of utopia that conquers utopia.
Paul Tillich, ‘Critique and Justification of Utopia’

This book began as a dissertation I finished almost two decades ago. In the process of revising the text for publication, I kept removing parts and replacing them with new ones while trying to keep the ship afloat. Eventually a completely different work emerged. As a graduate student, I was concerned with the question of utopia and transformation. How could we change our everyday, unjust realities and what could a better world look like? My conclusion was that Western utopias relied on the concept of progress and copied too faithfully the world from which they departed. Novels such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 seemed like a defeatist compromise. Contrary to this, I argued, Russian and East-European utopias longed for rather than depicted a qualitatively different world, emergent through revolution, in tension with nostalgia.

Years later, I remain interested in the question of transformation and in what Karl Mannheim¹ called ‘chiliastic’ and Russell Jacoby² ‘iconoclastic’ utopianism. At the same time, I regard ‘blueprint’ utopias with patience. While the latter try to imagine a better world, the former focus on the transcendence of the status quo. But transformation needs a vision. As Mannheim noted, what the world might look like after a chiliastic rupture is unclear. It may be better but it may be worse. I therefore came to believe we need blueprints, however speculative, incomplete and erroneous. Despite numerous critics’ efforts to show otherwise, ‘blueprint’ utopias remain commonly associated with totalitarianism; Jacoby, for example, wrote that only ‘[c]lues, fragments, and whispers – not blueprints – sustain […] hope’,³ as if blueprints were models, polished surfaces that themselves did not comprise of ‘clues, fragments, and whispers’. Throughout the following pages, I focus on ‘blueprint’ utopias and analyse them as literary works marked by contradictions and inconsistencies.

Second, I remain convinced that there are differences between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. Not essentialist differences but differences which continue to exist on socioeconomic as well as cultural levels. Yet clichéd as it may sound, I came to believe that problems such as poverty and destruction of the environment must be resisted through localized global movements and therefore a focus is needed on what the opposition to capitalism shares rather than on what separates us. For that reason, my emphasis now is on what utopias in the East and the West had in common even during the decades when the contexts in which they originated were in many ways different. In other words, instead of highlighting differences between utopian works produced in the ‘First’ and the ‘Second’ worlds, I emphasize what features they shared, and continue to share.

As this book has turned out to be a work of two decades, acknowledging and thanking those who helped it emerge involves friends and mentors from Duke University as well as students and colleagues from Charles University Prague. Special thanks to those involved in the book publication and my warmest thanks belong to my family: my immediate family as well as ‘the party of utopia’.

Since the early sixteenth century, when it was coined by Thomas More, the word ‘utopia’ has been used in reference to various formations. It has been applied to real enclaves, from nineteenth-century communities such as New Harmony, through twentieth-century Jewish kibbutzim to various contemporary artistic communes, but also to entertainment parks like Disneyland or Dinotopia. Nowadays, as Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini¹ pointed out, the word permeates the global cultural sphere in such ways that one may borrow money in a Utopia bank in Ireland, shop in a Utopia clothing store in Australia and relax in a Utopia fitness centre or a Utopia night club in England. Utopia has been even a reality show (albeit an unsuccessful one). In the literary world, utopia has also come to refer to a range of imaginary social arrangements, from a hierarchical system in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis: A Worke Unfinished Written by the Right Honourable Francis Lord Verulam, Viscount St Alban (1627),² aristocratic fantasies in Voyage to the Land of Ophir written in 1783–84 by Mikhail Shcherbatov, an all-female land in Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A World of Women (1880–81), a eugenic-run state in Francis Galton’s The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere (1911?), a modernized peasant commune in Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia (1920) by Alexander Chayanov, a military body in William W. Johnstone’s Out of the Ashes (1983) and a white supremacist formation in Andrew MacDonald’s The Turner Diaries (1978) – to democratic, feminist and environmentally-conscious communities in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars (1993–99).

Despite the proliferation of such and other diverse formations and literary works, utopia has been repeatedly pronounced dead; as Moylan and Baccolini pointed out as well, the fascination with utopia is ‘paralleled by a series of challenges to the legitimacy and efficacy of utopian anticipations’.³ However, the awaited death of utopia has never materialized. Every generation seems ready to witness the ‘ultimate failure’ of humankind to imagine and create a better world but at the same time continues to struggle and dream. At present, the twilight of utopia may appear inevitable after Stalinism, Nazism and more recently, global warming, epidemics and wars on various parts of the globe. Optimism withers in the face of continual economic injustice, ecological destruction, expanding military industry and cultural transformations which lead to what Russell Jacoby and others described as the eclipse of imagination.⁴ As Moylan argued in a decade framed by its own dystopian events, ‘utopian writing came upon hard times. Given world war, totalitarian rule, genocide, economic depression, nuclear destruction, massive famine, and disease, as well as the more subtle manipulations of mass industrial/consumer society, utopian discourse has, to say the least, been muted’.⁵

Capitalism of course exults in self-proclaimed improvements and people all over the world envision various better places, earthly and heavenly. Viewed through an over-a-century-old lens of the literary critic F. X. Šalda, there is a multitude of ‘paradises and utopias’ on the horizon. ‘Paradises. Paradises and utopias. There are several competing ones in the mist and vapor on the horizon of humanity’, Šalda wrote and added: ‘[P]aradises of children and paradises of old people; paradises of materialists and of souls religious and mystical; paradises that are scientific and technical and poetic paradises; paradises dreamed up by gold-diggers and paradises of the bankers.’⁶ The ‘principle of hope’, to use the well-known term coined by Ernst Bloch,⁷ has continued to drive the formation of the universal climate. The question, however, is what utopias have tried to envision cooperative, just and egalitarian communities for all.

Given the proliferation of supposedly utopian formations and works, we should consider the roots of the word ‘utopia’ and its critical function. It is important to call right-wing visions by their right name, to snatch ‘the utopian figure of the millennium’ from the likes of George H.W. Bush, who ‘in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1990 […] called for a new world of peace and prosperity’⁸ to be established by his type of administration. As far as such visions are camouflaged justifications of the status quo of exploitation, murder and war, they should not be referred to as utopias. It is true, as Peter Fitting⁹ noted, that in Darko Suvin’s definition of utopia in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, which I rely on throughout these pages, there is no specification of the more perfect community’s character. However, crucial for Suvin’s definition of utopia has been the notion of ‘cognitive estrangement’ (further differentiated as ‘critical’ and ‘mythical’¹⁰) along with the concept of the novum. Since Suvin highlighted differences between ‘fake’ and ‘radically liberating’ novums,¹¹ and added to his original definition a specification regarding utopia’s being constructed from the perspective of ‘discontented social classes interested in otherness and change’,¹² a right-wing utopia is a contradiction in terms. In works such as The Turner Diaries there is no critical estrangement from the status quo, certainly not from the perspective of the exploited and the oppressed. Even Fitting, who identified three categories of ‘right-wing utopias’, remarked that there is a legitimate question whether a text like The Turner Diaries can be called a utopia and suggested that such works should rather be read as dystopian ‘warnings of what the future holds if we fail to resist’.¹³ It is good to take the idea further: whatever name such right-wing imaginaries give themselves or are given on the market, they are anti-utopias that consciously work against efforts to envision and build a world free of exploitation and oppression. Due to such imaginaries, utopias which attempt to imagine egalitarian and cooperative communities have remained marginalized.¹⁴