Looking Forward to All Ahead
(III) Modern utopianism in the progressive regime of historicity
The accumulation of money, most often in the form of gold and silver appropriated from the newly colonized empires, laid the foundations for qualitatively different dimensions of national trade and the spread of political influence, industry, and innovative forms of technologies, the way the latter are handled, but also a new kind of repression exercised by the holders of the newly acquired capital — hence, property — over all others. The dawn of the Scientific Revolution came after little more than a quarter of a century. It engaged all the intellectual power of the Old World in a struggle for a new place for man (with)in the universe.
One might argue that, during the Enlightenment, Thomas More’s influence was integral to the future development of Europe.² But while his work handles something essential to my current reflections, as undoubtedly does to any thoughtful inquiry with utopia and utopianism, it still does not break entirely with the cyclical mode of historicity. Nor does Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, nor Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines. However, it’s debatable to what extent those just listed fall within the boundaries of my key operative concepts, those of hope-for and resistance-against that I have already described as the essential grounding of utopian imagination.
The issue, as I see it, is that these works are still seeking the presence of some human essence to exalt or ridicule; still, that is, are laying stones around. They are situated precisely between the two modes of historicity³; their historical contribution is that they find the idea of ‘newness’ (the new island of Utopia, the new Atlantic, the new and “subsequent discoveries of the Isle of Pines”) with a new connotation that differs dramatically from the dominant medieval understanding.
To elaborate on the latter claim — during the preceding centuries, the truthfulness of the narrative was based primarily on its relevance to universally recognized authorities.⁴ Its absence was evidence of fiction, of artifice, and surely not of serious philosophical reflection. Conversely, it is henceforth the critique of the antecedent that will constitute the serious philosophical attitude, and with it the form — and substance — of the idea of progress. From a lesson limiting the horizon of possibilities, the space of experience becomes a resource enabling the emancipation of and into the future.
The futuristic mode operates within a reversed hauntological prism.
On the other hand, the journey into the utopianism of the futurist mode of historicity always begins from the middle; not from the origin, but from the eventful middleness, which does not seek a limit that is once again a beginning, but a limit that is not a limit, being a continuous opposition to every limit. Necessary for unfolding the new regime are, therefore, the so-called ‘utopian socialists:’ the anarchists, then the communists,⁵ all of whom are dreaming of a new ‘nature.’
This time, nevertheless, nature is thought of as dependent on the environment, the context, not the Self — environment not just of the natural surrounding, but of the humanly contextual and therefore historical, of the social and the political, of the cultural and the economic; the environment as an unceasing weaving of the ‘and.. and… and…,”⁶ which — in its conjunctive entanglement — invokes and forces the intervention of the disjunctive “either… or… or…” as its radical alternative, as its specter or a phantom. The futuristic mode operates within a reversed hauntological prism.
But before the arrival of all those utopian progressives is, in a sense, Thomas Hobbes, but also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, as well as Mercier⁷ with his “writers” in a time that is and is not already here and now, as I write this; in the Year 2440, when human beings produced themselves as enlightened subjects through the Enlightenment and, in addition to being readers, had become writers, and as such discoverers and creators of their selves thanks to literacy.
Likewise, Nicolas de Condorcet who — being Hegel’s predecessor — ascertained the dynamics of the historical becoming of man’s social, historical, and scientific self-consciousness, and with it the various needs of his past, present, and future development.⁸ Convinced of the power of the scientific faculty to classify and reduce the facticity of what surrounds it to simple, easily assimilated, and general concepts whose simplicity is only attainable by an unassuming mind, but also believing in the unceasing flow of this facticity, of the accumulation of knowledge and ideas and their connection, Condorcet sees the future of man in the genius of the scientist, equality of education and opportunity, equality before the state, and in human rights that will enable a greater number of men to aid in the development of the sciences and the continual realization and re-realization of the progress of human reason. Both Mercier and Condorcet were, however, prominent supporters of the French Revolution. The former claimed to have predicted it; the latter — to set the program and tasks before it.⁹
Thus the assimilation of the new technology (i.e. the printing press) provided the necessary conditions for the progressive, no longer regressive, accumulation of historicity by the otherwise neglected masses. There was now room, at least on paper, for everyone and anyone in the ceaseless flight of history. The relative universalization of communication, the accessibility of ideas in an — as a consequence of the Reformation — everyday language, and the decline in the price of books¹⁰ transformed the conditions of knowledge and extended its reach. Already within the spirit of the French Revolution was sown the seed of a radical resistance of the oppressed against the oppressors, which would pass through Marx and, through him, live on to this day. And though the faction is different, though the oppressed and the oppressors are different, the struggle is essentially one. This new form of resistance is precisely the womb of the future. In Condorcet, we read:
[…] one had to give up that sneaky and false political theory which — forgetting that the very nature of men gives them equal rights — would in some places (i) apportion rights to countries on the basis of the size of territory, the climate, the national character, the wealth of the populace, or the state of commerce and industry, and in other places (ii) grant these rights unequally ·within countries· across the different classes of society, according to birth, fortune, or profession. The result of (ii) was to create contrary interests and opposing powers, which then created a need for a ·corrective· equilibrium — which •wouldn’t be needed if it weren’t for these inequalities and in any case •isn’t adequate to correct their dangerous influences. So they no longer ventured to divide mankind into two species,
•one destined to govern, the other to obey,
•one destined to lie, the other to be deceived,
and they had to recognise that all men have an equal right to be enlightened — to know all the truths — regarding all their interests, and that no power was established by the people for the people can be entitled to hide anything from the people.¹¹
We can see how ‘human nature’ is now thought of as essentially shared for all of us, regardless of race, class, religion, etc. We have said goodbye to the molds. One more step and our essence will become the variable directed by the situation itself, and therefore if we want another ‘nature,’ another ‘essence,’ or another history even, we will have to change the conditions in which man finds himself. One step further, and Marx would write:
[…] man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man — state, society.
But also that
Religion […] is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.¹²
Thus the newly established field of political theory, now trying to free itself from theological mystifications, aims at the establishment of the unestablished human reality. Its hope-for gussied up in the robes of a future of equality without essences, and its resistance-against is opposed to the inherited and ruthless inequality established by a handful of haves through the labor and tears of everyone else.
The futurist regime is capitalism’s offspring and at this point thinks of itself as its executioner.
The successors of the French Revolution‘s legacy: Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, etc., and — on the island — Robert Owen, for example, defined as utopians with the familiar negativity to which the word still refers today — as by reactionary forces, but also by Marx himself a bit later¹³ — in fact brought, especially with their attempts to organize new types of communities, to the consciousness not only of the possibilities of change here and now, but of a change that is oriented towards a whole series of future changes.
On the other side are other radical visionaries, such as Max Stirner and
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. On the horizon is the Paris Commune, and around the corner are Bakunin and Kropotkin. In short, all of them, in this time span of little more than a century, helped to unleash and consolidate the futurist mode of historicity, which set before itself as its highest ideal the unceasing striving to improve the conditions of our existence, and specifically that of those already postulated as workers. The latter thus begin to organize, consolidate, engineer, and think of themselves as active historical subjects. Massive strikes flood both the Old and the New World. Utopianism will never be the same again, and the conviction of this is to be found in the last utopian writers of the nineteenth and the first ones of the twentieth century: William Morris, Emile Zola, Edward Bellamy,¹⁴ the early works of Herbert Wells, and many others.
Yet the new century holds many more portents than the fellowship of utopists expected. The specter that Marx and company, half a century earlier, tried to bring into existence, countering the “tales” of it, “a manifesto of the party itself,” is no longer nearly so spectral, and, as expected, “all the forces of old Europe” are uniting in a “holy alliance” against it. In a sense, it is an alliance against the very foundations of futurism as I present it here. An antithesis opposing it by all means — though at first only as a specter — that in fact affirms it and brings it to a relative now-ness. The futurist regime is capitalism’s offspring and at this point thinks of itself as its executioner. The new regime of historicity is at its apogee and does not even know it, because — willy-nilly — is condemned to a spectral presence, to an increasingly insufficient incarnation.
Marxists have long attributed progressive dynamism and technological development precisely to the form of capitalist production established since the Industrial Revolution. Advances in technology, transportation, much scientific invention, and so on, are all a consequence of capital’s immanent ambitions to grow by squeezing more surplus value out of its workers. But in turn the futurism inherent in the capitalist system, understood as a particular frame of thought and social structure of the time, relates similarly to the past. It thinks of it as something that at any given moment can be seen differently, and therefore be otherwise.
The past is imbued with futurity, with the possibility of discoveries or information that will prefigure how it will have itself as a past, and so not only the future but also the past, and every present, are capable of accumulating futurity. Here is the vulnerable interpretation I spoke of in my introductory essay. It’s only possible here, in the particularities of a progressive orientation that sees the past the way it sees the future — not as a constant, but as a vulnerable and fragile variable.¹⁵
It is important to note that it was also during Futurism that a new movement in literature — and not only — developed, diametrically opposed to the Romantic utopias that preceded it, namely dystopia. If utopia is an articulation of hope for a better tomorrow, dystopia is an articulation of fear and doubt that it may not be. Its warnings entail the same commitment as ‘positive’ utopias. Insofar as they juxtapose, sift, and point fingers, dystopias incite hope-for something other than what they present to us, and resistance-against that which would bring it to fruition. They make us doubt the small steps we take, the contextuality of the human situation, and what will follow it; and this would mean that dystopia is unconditionally linked to thinking about a future and the future of thinking.
Notes
If necessary, see The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 by Lucien Febvre and Jean Henri Martin translated by David Gerard. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, 1976; or Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press by Jeremiah Dittmar, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2011) 126, 1133–1172.
See e.g. Gury Jacques. The Image of Thomas More in the Age of Enlightenment. In: XVII-XVIII. Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. N°24, 1987. pp. 53–61, where we read, “In the Tower More advocates the right of the individual to freedom of mind and thought in the face of tyranny, which cannot be satisfied by anything but foolish obedience,” p. 57.
Frederick Jameson, in turn, argues that utopias flourish in “transitional periods.” See Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Fredric Jameson; Verso Books; p. 15. Darren Webb criticizes this position insofar as he believes the vague term “transitional” can be applied to any era. See Darren Webb, Exploring the Relationship Between Hope and Utopia: Toward a Conceptual Framework; POLITICS: 2008 VOL 28(3), pp 197–206, p 201. In relation to the present paper, however, this vague term gains clarity in the context of Artog’s formal methodology and so-called ‘modes of historicity’, and the transitional states necessary to explicate them.
See the introduction to Oxford World`s Classics: Three Modern Utopias by Susan Bruce; Oxford University Press, 1999.
American liberal utopianism of the late 19th century will, alas, remain untouched here, not only because it does not fit into the transition that Kozelek calls Sattelzeit (a period roughly marked from 1750 to 1850), but also because of my insufficient knowledge of the matter.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Planes; ed. “Criticism and Humanism 2009; translated by Antoaneta Koleva, p. 39.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, ‘L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais’, first publication 1771, Amsterdam, Van- Harrevelt.
Nicolas de Condorcet, “l’Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain”; first publication 1795.
It’s here we find the idea of evolution and production, as well as their opposite, i.e. the idea of becoming and progress. Both hierarchical series and evolutionary structures are transferred from the social and its knowledge of itself onto nature, albeit with a delay. Darwin finds himself in a world of social, political, and economic becoming, a world of changing constants, of hope-for and resistance-against the suspension of the fixed series of essences. Hence the necessary contextual impetus. Incipit vita nova. But it’s also during this period that the principle of productivity of which Marcuse speaks takes shape, through the imposition of work-discipline, the time-framing of the working day, and so on (See Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, Past & Present, №38; Dec., 1967, pp. 56–97), which in effect externalize the engines of vital activity and, therefore, of progress needed for it to be. This question of great importance, alas, I only identify.
See note 1.
N. Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Advances of the Human Mind, translated by Jonathan Bennett 2017, p. 70.
Karl Marx “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in Selected Works, vol. 9, pp. 145–6.
Who adds that they are essentially reactionary. See “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, and “The Development of Socialism from Utopia into Science,” Selected Works, vol. 1.
“After 100 Years” (original title: Looking Backward: 2000–1887).
But also the consequences of quantum mechanics in the new century, as we know, locate the subject no longer in the privileged position of passive spectator, in which we find him in the preceding history of Western thought, but in the position of spect-actor, of accomplice in the becoming of that which sees and is therefore no longer seen from the outside but from the inside, from the very process of realizing
historicity. Hence the particular setting of modern utopias and utopianism in general, in relation to the future seen from the position of the participant, the very creator of the future.
