Looking Forward to All Behind
(II) Early utopianism in the cyclical regime of historicity
In this piece, you can read the introductory remarks to the present essay, part of a series. I did this research a couple of years ago. It was meant as an academic paper and published by a university-related journal. After the peer-review process, however, the editor decided to upload it without my footnotes—about 3000+ words—as well as without any attempt to contact me. I’ve asked them to take it down. This is the first time it sees light.
Here and in the next few articles—each following the original’s section or two—you’ll find a reader-friendlier and edited version.
Within the early mythologies, as well as in classical and biblical literature, one can find an abundance of utopian ideas and aspirations. What they have in common is their starting point — a time prior to the present social, political and/or economic structures. In Hesiod, Athenaeus, Virgil’s Arcadia, and the first book of Moses in the Old Testament, there are precise accounts of past “golden” times of harmony and wholeness. The Garden of Eden is the most popular among these descriptions of the pre-historical state in which man found himself.
Moments cleansed of the additional elements tainting primordial beings — themselves emerging as a consequence of the accumulation of time and the relations between humans and nature — can also be found in ancient Indian orthodox and unorthodox texts. The ones listed above constitute a particular form of escapism, setting up lines of escape, of hope-for, in the opposite direction to the expected one. The primordial purity of man’s togetherness in the world requires a constant striving for return, for recollection, which has been done by keeping narrative and myth alive, breathing, and pulsating back and forth from the past.
In Plato’s famous dialogue The Republic, the recollection or anamnesis remains the primary mark of the proper relation to the historical determinant of the preceding time. And while the path that Socrates lays before the state demands the seeking and leading ostensibly forward, it is nevertheless a path laid and mapped out in the heights of the objectives, which are themselves material realizations of the true order, inevitably corresponding to the truth in origin. And it, “the origin, always precedes the fall, the body, the world, time: it is from the side of the gods, and the account of it always sings a theogony.”¹
This would imply a recollection and a return — albeit in the dialectical endeavor taking place here and now — to the primary and universal philosophical ideals, to the genesis of those in the divine beforetimes. Platonic citizens should be reminded of their corresponding place in relation to the order as such:
[…] each one should be used only for that work for which he is by nature fit, so that, each one having his own work to do, he may not be scattered many sides, but have only one occupation; in the same way, the whole state should be united […].
(IV, 423d)
Although Socrates speaks of a non-existent state system, it is based precisely on what is found in the primary and natural inclinations of the citizens, that is: in their ideal selves, in their conformity to the universal genus to which they belong, or, to put it another way, to their natural predestination. The potters, to potter; the watchmen, to guard; the philosophers, to govern, etc. Human activity is at once fixed, immutable, and deployed based on natural gifts. The golden, silver, brass, and iron beginnings of which Socrates speaks are precisely the essential molds in which the individually embodied being is formed; ideal types but also supreme guides of his life activity.
Thus, each individual’s location in the state hierarchy should be considered the consequence of an almost structurally determining natural selection. The latter is made possible by the conditions laid down by that same state for realizing and unfolding the individual’s inherent imperative to be themselves, whether through upbringing, education, or laws.
The problem, Socrates insists, is precisely that people do not see nature (here understood as our very essence, and thus our role as human beings in a given society) as dominating them, or rather they have forgotten the necessity of remembering, of becoming themselves again or coming to themselves. What if we decide that a poor farmer, for example, good at his job, should become rich and statesmanlike instead of continuing to work his land?
We may also clothe the farmers in splendid garments and adorn them with gold, and then command them to work the land for pleasure, […] but do not advise us to do this, for if we listen to you, […] the farmer will no longer be a farmer […] and no one else will keep anything of what makes up the whole country.
(IV, 420e)
In essence, Plato’s utopia seems to me a hope-for an elitist, aristocratic, and hierarchical polity; a conformity to what the idea or group of ideas is before its/their own incarnation. But it is also a resistance-against the existing social order that has allowed the most vicious and benighted people to gain access to the material grounds of power. The elitist image that the four beginnings of metals represent invokes a naturalness opposed to the existing order of the polis; an alternative that corresponds to and is guaranteed by the rationality, universality, and naturalness of the hierarchy of values and endowments against which all that exists must be related.
Polis democracy was realized through collective participation and complicity in religious and ritual practices, accompanied by theatrical performances on days for worshipping the gods, voting, and so on. All of these took place in settings marked by at least relative uniformity, if only because of the possibility of sharing the spaces common to the whole — the temples, the theatres, the squares, the forums. Losing the distinctions between the different communal classes, the immediate consequence for the polis was the transformation of the crowd that had lost its place — even if it consisted exclusively of free citizens — into a mass endowed with political power.
Ambitious and avaricious, its representatives, in defiance of their ignorance, sought ways to impose and perpetuate their interests, which inevitably led to oligarchic power. Exposing their lack of education and training is also one of the things that Socrates, as the protagonist in the plethora of Plato’s dialogues, is explicitly committed to. Contempt for the sophists, the poets, the drama, is a corollary of the same. The richness of their rhetoric distracts, relativizes, and, as a result, moves away from the path of naturalness and original commitments, engaging people in a superfluous discourse that creates illusions in their minds.
The diffusion of activity and its corollary, the distraction from everyday endeavors, as Plato seems to be trying to tell us, leads to a refusal of rationality, and therefore to an abdication before the search for the concreteness of knowledge and truth, of the knowledge of truth and the truth of knowledge laid within us. Rulers are born to rule as farmers are born to farm. It is one thing to till the soil, and yet another to govern. This differentiation does not depend on one’s name, clan, etc., but on the essential characteristics of each individual. The ideal state, then, is a state ruled by intellectuals who are no longer repressed, who know the absolute truth and lead others to it.
In a sense, we can think of Socrates, and that is exactly how I see his image presented by his disciple, as the antithesis of ancient democracy or its perverse deviations. No one can challenge his intellectual superiority over others, and at the same time he himself does not miss an opportunity to recall his own ignorance; an ignorance that no one else deigns, or should, to admit. In order to be active political subjects, citizens in the polis must be experts in the art of statecraft, and it is here that we find the discrepancy between their daily activities — one or other form of craft, agriculture, etc. — and the superior public activity expected of them.
By its very nature, democracy is particularly vulnerable, fragile, and marked by a multitude of irresolvable contradictions. It is in a constant stalemate: unable to choose between retaliating against its opponents for fear of destroying its own foundations, or defending itself and its inherent tolerance, leaving itself open to the incursions of internal and external enemies.
In the face of Socrates, ancient democracy faced a similar stalemate. His trial — a farce, as it is presented to us — and his subsequent death, albeit now in a time of oligarchic rule, testify to a response that violated principles, but was nonetheless a salutary salvo in favor of a system facing the danger brought by its perceived enemy. In such a case, the anger of Plato — representative of the few educated ignorant — is partly justified, partly not, like any anger. The latter leaves its mark on his entire oeuvre, imbued with rebellion and resistance-against the situation in which his contemporaries found themselves. The derivation of the essential, though used as an analytical tool for critical engagement with the present, calls forth not the past but the timelessness from which it springs and from which it is directed.
What is at stake here is not the reversibility of time, but the necessity of seeing the antecedent genesis of things, the antecedent embodiment, as a pure and complete manifestation of truth. The specterish, vanishing presence of utopianism to which we are accustomed from modern, revolutionary utopias is here realized rather backward. Its opposite is that of the spirit — as the bearer of the pre-present wholeness — not the ghost. The ghost comes to visit, as Derrida would say. It is the event of the visit itself, or the eventful ghostliness of seeing-from-behind a hidden, unrealized presence that is still here, or at least makes us feel it is here. The ghost, in a metaphorical and rather artistic sense, is the bearer of the essence of the idea, and therefore of the idea itself, the ghost of becoming.
Plato’s utopia is the utopia of what is essentially set and signifies what is eternally becoming within the absolute. It is a highly intellectual myth, not because it does not carry within it the seed of change — or at least not entirely because of it — but because it is first and foremost the vehicle of the repetition and reiteration of the essence, of the totality enclosed within itself, inspired by an ideal present that precedes being.
What is sought is not the alteration of the “essence” that has brought about the present state of affairs, but a change in the conditions that surround it; not a change of nature, but the delineation of subordination and subsistence commensurate with it that will guarantee its full expression in what is presence.
The charge of cyclicity that repeats itself and closes the circuit, realizing the inevitability of the whole, of closure in and for, is the charge of myth, and the
[…] utopia is the imposition of human reason and will on myth (of the Golden Age). It is man’s striving to grasp through the imagination what happens or is to happen when the primal longings embodied in myth the principle of reality. In this aspiration, man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some indefinite time: he assumes the role of creator.²
In other words, it is a sustained backward/upward-looking utopia; in seeking itself, it affirms the cyclical mode of historicity by limiting the horizon of expectations from the space of experience. It does not require the individual to step into the role of a creator but of a performer. And Plato’s utopia will find its manifestations. From the Roman Republic and Caesarism, through the god-inspired Western and Eastern empires of the Middle Ages, the high monarchies, all the way to — with some provisos— modern representative democracy, it will produce doers of preordained commands.
We have seen how a certain temporal pattern dictates a certain temporal perspective. That is not going to change. The systems’ perspective and the perspective of the various actors opposing it remain intimately linked. Systemic repression and coercion stimulate but also constrain, incite but also extinguish both hope and resistance. On the other hand, the temporal structure, such as it is for its subjugated subjects in the concreteness of the topos, is in a state of perpetual insufficient emancipation. Utopianism turns, even in these early times, to time as its source of hope, but also as an opportunity in the face of its resistance.
Despite the large historical period which I will skip over without much specificity, in the following essay I will try to show how utopian thinking in the futurist or modern mode of historicity attacks the very closed cocoon of the essential, of ideal typology, in order to allow the unfolding of lines of escape, of becoming, and of resistance.
Notes
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Genealogy of Modernity.
T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1970.