Thomas More created the word utopia with a deliberate contradiction. The word is a deliberate play between the term eutopos, the good place and outopos, no place. Tensions over the meaning of the word have only intensified over the succeeding centuries, and one can now find a multiplicity of definitions of the term that are not only mutually exclusive, but are radically disconnected from each other. It would be futile to try to cover the full extent of the proliferation of meanings that the term has taken, but many of those meanings have taken the form lazy polemics against any effort to create a more socially just word and aren't really worth the engagement. Instead, I want to look at the way the term has been taken up in very different and distinct ways in relationship to a series of radical projects, notably the anti-utopian turn of thinkers ranging from Michel Foucault to James C. Scott, the embrace of the term by Ernst Bloch, and finally the subsumption of the term into the generic framework of science fiction by radical critics such as Darko Suvin.
Before I get into that conversation, it's remarkable to the degree that these distinct camps, those who reject and embrace the term, don't engage with one another. In each case, the term not only takes on a different meaning, but is placed in reference to radically different objects and social formations. The utopian project critiqued by Michel Foucault and James C. Scott is distinctively a state formation, although Foucault is focused on the forms of knowledge that construct that state formation, directed towards creating spaces that are easily comprehended by an outside observer. For instance, both thinkers discuss the organization of the French state, and in particular, the efforts to transform Paris into a kind of garden city. The utopian state project transforms the muddle of daily life into something that is easily graspable within a single gaze. It reduces complexity to create order. Foucault's rather lengthy description in The Order of Things provides a useful description of this particular framework.
Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax that we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together.' This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopia (and those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (Foucault xviii)
For Foucault,the utopia brings together the ease of the gaze with the flow of the narrative. It is a place of order untroubled by the complexities and contradictions of ordinary life. It's a space that is simultaneously impossible but easily imaginable. It's not hard to see the connection between this vision and the structures of knowledge that Foucault discusses in the initial section of the text itself, the grids of intelligibility created by figures such as Linneus. We find our space of tables and grids, individualization constructed through forms of gradation and differentiation. It's also tempting to draw a line from this conception to Foucault's later critique of the prison found in Discipline and Punish. The panopticon, after all, operates through the internalization of the gaze of the prison guard, which can only occur through the potential universal access of that gaze. At the same time, Foucault still holds onto the tension as created by More. After all, utopias 'have no real location' and are 'fanastic.' Within this context, it's not surprising that he creates a tension between the 'fantastic' utopia and the indescribable but very concrete and real heterotopia. The latter shatters the illusion of the order of the former with its messy complexity of daily life.
It's hard not to see a strong connection between this critique and the critique presented by James C. Scott in his text, Seeing Like a State. Scott begins his text by looking at German forestry in the 18th century and moves into a discussion of state projects, ranging from the attempt to reorganize the rationalize the city of Paris in the 19th century to agricultural projects in the United States and the Soviet Union in the 20th century and the construction of the city of Brasilia. Through that process, Scott critiques a phenomenon that he labels 'high modernism.' 'High modernism is an attempt to create a sort of order and productivity through a process of simplification. To give a sense of the project, Scott opens by describing efforts on the part of German Foresters to expand lumber production. These individuals come to the conclusion that the production of lumber is being limited by the scrub and underbrush of the forest. This junk, the hypothesize, is getting in the way of the trees growing as quickly as they can. They then went about removing all of the underbrush in order to allow for the most efficient growth of the forest. The plan went well for the first few years, but then the forests collapsed. It turns out all of that underbrush was crucial for the working ecology of the forest. In this sense, Scott also replicates the tension found both in Foucault and in More. The high modernist project turns out to be a chimerical fantasy that can only be implemented by force and results in only disaster.
Utopia's sympathizers imagine a very different framework for the utopian impulse, focusing on the literary tradition of the word and on a very different reception history, the unintentional and unruly uptake of the tradition by social movements. Probably the most intense version of this perspective is taken up by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who offers a radically different understanding of the word than any other person discussed in this posting. Bloch against the tendency of later thinkers who borrow from his framework, shows very little interest in the literary tradition of the utopia. Bloch is not a genre theorist and finds those works a distraction from the phenomenon that he wants to discuss. For Bloch, one must understand the utopia as a sort of impulse, a trace that marks out the existence of other possibilities, for other ways of life. Bloch looked for this trace in every conceivable place, from dreams to advertisements to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. These traces pointed to other possibilities of life and the desire for transformation in even the vilest of social formations. It was also an impulse that he linked to insurrectionary social movements, most notably the eschatological formations created by Thomas Muntzer and others during the civil wars of Germany in the 16th century. Throughout all of these examples, Bloch looks for the expression for the desire for something new, something different. Bloch frames this impulse through the concept of the Novum, "the unexpectedly new, which pushes humanity out of its present towards the not yet realized" (Moylan para 4).
Despite his aversion to the generic formation of the utopia, Bloch's insights were most quickly embraced by a school of science fiction critics who were interested in embracing the utopia as the forerunner of the genre of science fiction. This branch of thought is largely started through the work of Darko Suvin and his work on the genre, notably his text, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, but the work has been taken up by a variety of other critics such as Philip Wegner and Fredric Jameson. Suvin emphasizes a number of things about the genre that distinguish his take from the above thinkers. Most significantly, Suvin conceives of the utopia within the shifts in the understanding of history that were going on at the time of the construction of utopian narratives. Suvin notes that there is a radical shift in the nature of More's narrative. Rather than imagining a sort of golden age, More imagines a community that has a sort of history, a beginning and just as significantly, an open and unfolding process of becoming. The nation has come across a set of rules that work for it, but it also continues to interact and transform its neighbors. (Interestingly, Benedict Anderson makes a similar observation about the construction of utopian narrative forms and the rise of the empty homogeneous time that undergirds the logic of the nation-state, which is synthesized in Wegner's Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity.)
Suvin takes up the concept of the Novum as developed by Bloch and uses it as a key term for the understanding of science fiction. The Novum still remains a novelty that points to something new, but that newness loses the eschatological framework that dominates Bloch's thinking. The Novum continues to be some sort of novelty, whether in the form of some sort of invention or some sort of sociological or political transformation, but instead offering a moment of redemption, the Novum creates the conditions for the kind of totalizing cognitive estrangement, which presents a radically different society. Contrary to many of his critics, Suvin is far less concerned about the technoscientific veracity of such a Novum, and is far more concerned about its engagement with its engagement with the class struggles that define its present. Within this context, the work of H.G. Wells is more significant than the work of Jules Verne, despite Verne's greater concern with technoscientific veracity. In effect, the Novum becomes a way of using the shifts in the concept of time that were introduced with capitalist accumulation in order to imagine radically different ways of life. Suvin looks to the Novum to provide the means to imagine new ways of life, but ways of life that still remain historical in nature, even if the future societies are different.
In the end, these particular takes on the word are irreconcilable. Constructing an antagonism between the camps would itself assume too much ground. Instead, the two perspectives constitute a kind of non-relationship, perhaps close to what Jean Francois Lyotard refers to as the Differend, "a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy (Lyotard xi). My own work has tended to work on one side of this bifurcation or another. For instance, my readings of China Mieville like many other critics has framed that work in relationship to hybridity and heterotopia, while my work on writers such as Ursula Le Guin has engaged with the utopian tradition, again, not unique. Just as significantly, I've found myself continually returning to the work of Suvin, who draws on the tradition to frame the history of the development of science fiction. Utopia within that context is a continual haunting, a gesture towards other possibilities and a refusal to naturalize the present. At the same time, Foucault and Scott's critique of high modernism has an equally significant influence over how I think of social and political projects, ranging from long term prospects for transformation to the processes of daily life. I suspect that this disjunction will not be changing any time soon.
