Figures of Utopia

Acknowledgements

This book was completed a few months after the passing of Fredric Jameson, without whose decisive intellectual impact it could not have been written. My debt to him is immeasurable. Many others have been vital to its gestation over the years as critical interlocutors, valuable research guides and sources of enlightenment, engagement and inspiration: Tom Moylan, Phillip E. Wegner, Raffaella Baccolini, Michael Kelly, Joachim Fischer, Darko Suvin, Patricia McManus, Christopher Kendrick, Sarah Hogan, James Holstun, Richard Halpern, Crystal Bartolovich, Eric D. Smith, Timothy Brennan, Keya Ganguly, Christopher Connery, Paula Rabinowitz, Marty Roth, David Palumbo-Liu, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Simos Zenios, Stella Achilleos, Peter Marks, Laurence Davis, Darren Webb, Nathaniel Coleman, Peter Brown, Daniel Selden, Mariano Paz, Fátima Vieira, Jorge Bastos da Silva, Kevin McNamara, Alexander Nehamas, Stathis Gourgouris, Tziovanis Georgakis, Christos Hadjioannou, Ioannis Trisokkas, Chrysa Moysidou, Evgenia Grammaticopoulou, Georgia Manoura, Apostolos Lampropoulos, Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, Prabhakara Jha, Jorge León Casero, and Julia Urabayen.

My thanks also extend to Dimitri Gondikas at the Hellenic Studies Program, Princeton University, where a Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship got on me on the path to classical Greek study; to the University of California, Santa Cruz, for its warm hospitality and support during an unforgettable teaching-and-research quarter; to Stanford University, for allowing me to air some of the ideas of Chapter 9 in a brilliant and challenging academic environment; to the University of Limerick, for giving me several opportunities to talk and to listen to others talk on utopia; to the Cypriot artist George Gavriel, for his kind permission to use his “Floating City” on the cover page; to Yiannos Christoforou, for his prompt help with digital processing; and to the University of Cyprus, for all its institutional and material support over the years.

Note on the Text

In preparing this manuscript, several changes have been made to the original published version of the essays it contains (the introductory essay and the postscript being new work). The objectives were first, to eliminate redundancy and unnecessary repetition; second, to insert some important cross-referencing points that link the different essays; third, to occasionally revise phrasing, add a few more recent bibliographical references, and eliminate errors in the original publications; and last, to provide more extensive versions when this was possible and desirable (especially in Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, and 12). The principal intention has been to enhance the thematic cohesion and methodological unity of this volume.

Throughout this volume, the term Utopia in italics is reserved exclusively for Thomas More’s text. So are the capitalized adjective Utopian (Utopian citizens, Utopian economy, etc.), which refers exclusively to aspects of the society of Thomas More’s Utopia, and the capitalized noun Utopians. Exceptions to this rule comprise first-word capitalization in chapter and section titles and in Works Cited, and the preservation of the capitalized variant in reference to the broader genre, tradition, and concept in citations from other scholars. In my own use, references to the broader genre, tradition, and concept are always uncapitalized to facilitate distinction from specific references to More’s text: “utopia,” “utopian,” “utopic.”

Chapter 1, “The Fractured Image: Plato, the Greeks, and the Figure of the Ideal City,” appearing here in revised and slightly extended form, was originally published in Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice, edited by Tom Moylan and Michael Griffin (Peter Lang, 2007). It is published with the kind permission of Peter Lang.

Chapter 2, “Pigs in Heaven? Utopia, Animality and Plato’s Hūopolis,” appearing here in revised and slightly extended form, was originally published in The Epistemology of Utopia: Rhetoric, Theory and Imagination, edited by Jorge Bastos da Silva (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). It is published with the kind permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Chapter 3, “Celestial Cities and Rationalist Utopias,” appearing here in revised and moderately extended form, was originally published in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, edited by Kevin McNamara (Cambridge University Press, 2014). It is published with the kind permission of Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 4, “‘The Latter End of [the] Commonwealth Forgets the Beginning’: Empire and Utopian Economics in Early Modern New World Discourse,” appearing here in revised and moderately extended form, was originally published in Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, vol. 9 (2001). It is published with the kind permission of the journal.

Chapter 5, “‘Suffer a Sea Change’: Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia,” appearing here in revised and moderately extended form, was originally published in Cultural Critique no. 63 (Spring 2006). It is published with the kind permission of Cultural Critique and the University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 6, “‘Utopiae Insulae Figura’: Utopian Insularity and the Politics of Form,” appearing here in revised form, was originally published in a special issue on insularity in Transtext(e)s-Transcultures 跨文本跨文化: Journal of Global Cultural Studies, Hors série 2008. It is published with the kind permission of the journal.

Chapter 7, “Dark Light: Utopia and the Question of Surplus Population,” appearing here in revised form, was originally published in Utopian Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (2016). It is published with the kind permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chapter 8, “The Dialectics of Reverie: Daydreaming and the (Un)Fair City,” appearing here in revised form, was originally published in Utopia, Ideology, and Equity in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Cities, edited by Michael G. Kelly and Mariano Paz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). It is published with the kind permission of Springer/Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 9, “Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia,” appearing here in revised form, was originally published in Theory & Event, vol. 12, no. 3 (2009). It is published with the kind permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 10, “Factories, Utopias, Decoration and Upholstery: On Utopia, Modernism and Everyday Life,” appearing here in revised and slightly extended form, was originally published in Utopian Studies vol. 25, no. 2 (2014). It is published with the kind permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chapter 11, “Utopia and Marxism,” appearing here in revised form, was originally published as “Marxism” in the Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature, edited by Fatima Vieira, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor and Peter Marks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). It is published with the kind permission of Springer/Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 12, “Anti-Anti-Utopia for Post-Socialist Times: Jameson’s An American Utopia in Perspective,” appearing here in revised and moderately extended form, was originally published in Rethinking Democracy for Post-Utopian Worlds: Alternative Political Projects After the Sovereign State, edited by Jorge León Casero and Julia Urabayen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). It is published with the kind permission of Springer/Palgrave Macmillan.

Figures and Illustrations

Figure 1: Plato’s contemporary Athens as ideological mediation between two mythical prototypes

Figure 2: Magnesia (The Laws) as ideological mediation between Kallipolis and Atlantis

Figure 3: Semiotic relations between forms of accumulation, animal slaughter, and expenditure in Thomas More’s Utopia

Figure 4: Ideologemes operative in the semiotic system comprised of forms of accumulation, killing, and expenditure in Thomas More’s Utopia

Figure 5: Complex system of ideological relations subtending the economics of Thomas More’s Utopia

Figure 6: Generic possibilities deriving from utopia

Illustration 1: Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (“The Ambassadors”), 1533. National Gallery, London. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Illustration 2: World map from Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographica, 1482. Reproduced by permission of the British Library

Illustration 3: Martin Waldseemüller, Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes. World map published along with Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae Introductio, 1507. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Illustration 4: Diagrammatic world map, from St. Isidore’s Etymologies, eleventh century. Reproduced with permission by the British Library

Illustration 5: Fool’s cap map of the world, ca. 1580. Bodleian Library. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Illustration 6: Ambrosius Holbein, woodcut for Sir Thomas More, Utopia. First edition, Dirk Martens, Louvain, 1516. Bibliothèque National de France. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Illustration 7: George Gavriel, “Floating City.” Larnaca Biennale, Cyprus, 2001. With permission from the artist

Illustration 8: Edmond Coppin, Engraving of Laputa. From Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, French edition as Voyages de Gulliver, Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1875. Under licence from Album Archivo Fotográfico, S.L.

INTRODUCTION Labors of the Figure: On Utopia and Textual Practice

The essays that comprise this volume span almost twenty-five years of research in utopian studies. It is a long time, especially for a project that does not aspire to be either comprehensive (it is, on the contrary, quite eclectic in its choice of primary texts) or definitive (it does not pretend to offer an overarching genre theory of utopia or to define it in all its literary, political, and philosophical guises). Something, therefore, needs to be said in the form of an explanation of and accounting for the raison d’être of this volume, which, methodologically speaking, is at once modest and ambitious. Let me then articulate the theoretical foundations of the hermeneutic inquiries that comprise it.