Preliminary Notes to a Genealogy of Utopianism

(I) Hope-for, resistance-against, and Hartog’s regimes of historicity

The Land of Cockaigne, Pieter Bruegel +/-

In the present piece, you are about to read the introductory remarks to a series of essays. 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.

If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way.

Ursula Le Guin, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place To Be

Utopia, or that non-place that has long found its place in the history of ideas, can be reached by various non-ways. Any attempt to follow the genealogy of the concept presupposes taking into account the different historical conditions of utopian thinking and only then could help us make sense of the debates about “What is utopia?” or “What is utopianism?”. The additional inquiry behind these questions is the possibility of utopia in the present, which we find ourselves in and which many call post-utopian. Yet as Ryan K. Balot notes, “the answer given to failed utopias should be the search for new ones.“¹

The traditional understanding of utopia as a ‘genre,’ be it strictly literary, strictly philosophical, or somewhere in between, does not allow for the uncovering of utopianism’s ‘essence.’ The latter, in turn, can hardly be revealed to us without considering an — if not strict, at least broad — ontological schema of both the notions of hope and that of resistance. My first task, therefore, will be to think through and within them.

What is hope and what is resistance? How are they constituted? Why is it precisely their interdependence that enables utopia not only as a specific perspective in a given subject but also within the sphere of intersubjectivity — an inescapable horizon of collective thought, imagination, and meaning?

When Reinhart Koselleck speaks of “the entering of the future into utopia,” he is moving in a direction very appropriate to the present exposition. When, on the other hand, he speaks of “the transformation of utopia into a philosophy of history”² and concludes that Louis Sebastien Mercier’s work The Year 2440, published shortly before the eruption of the French Revolution, marked the beginning of the “temporalization of utopia,”³ he makes, I believe, a fundamental error.

The word utopia, insofar as it refers to the τόπος, the place, if only to negate or affirm it as “good,” already presupposes the intersection of time and space, and is therefore by definition meaningfully oriented toward both spatiality and temporality. Moreover, Koselleck’s analysis rethinks the utopian attitude in terms of its historical location once in the spatial, then in the temporal. I concede that such an observation is not excluded: even though, in fact, it covers an extremely specific period of history of utopia and that of mankind — that of the topography of the hitherto untopographed, i.e. the Age of Discovery,⁴ and that which follows as its offsprings. Although he does not refer explicitly to any work, Koselleck speaks of the “space of experience of previous utopias” which is “originally spatial.”⁵

The analysis I offer treats the spatial as an inevitable accomplice in the workings of an imagination innately obsessed with it, rather than as the primary driver of the becoming of utopianism. Different aspects of life at a specific point in history can be understood through how those living it have sought the necessity of change, and change requires temporality as its formative condition. The spatiality of utopia, even when located on a lonely island or remote planet, is permeated by that here,⁶ the seventh direction, the center that is everywhere.

The question we should ask then is through which modes of temporality utopia is formed and whether that formation depends on any difference in the historical situation. This is the place to call aid the formal methodology developed by François Hartog in his work Regimes of Historicity.⁷ In it, the author explores the significant moments in our history that have led to transversal temporal slices, as Gadamer would put it, or to reversals in the way we apprehend, relate to, and articulate the modalities of time and, in particular, to the historical dominance of any of them.

For Hartog, the traditional mode constructs a cyclical time in which the past sets and prescribes the state of affairs in both the present and the future. Being wholly situated in the experience of the past, the “horizon of expectations” for the future is conceptualized primarily through the idea of succession and the return to it. As we enter the Industrial Age, the primary impetus for a novel conception of history is given — one that opens the door to futurity and progress. In it, the “horizon of expectations” is no longer limited and dissociated from the realm of experience.

Thus the mode of historicity, and with it the historical narrative, differs radically from what is happening here and now, especially from what has happened before. Hartog calls this situation a “futuristic mode of historicity,” or a “modern” one. By closing the chapter of the past, this new regime opens up the possibility for a specific pretense. An “objective” examination of the historical closure of the past appeared. In other words, only within this regime does historiography — as distinct scientific inquiry — become possible. This regime, of course, reached its limit with the collapse of the USSR. The “end of history,” as postulated by Francis Fukuyama, is the ideal limit of the futurist regime of historicity.

The end of the futuristic regime comes as a result of

… the reflux of the revolutionary idea and the conservative assertion of the lack of an alternative to capitalism [which] are only the most salient symptoms of a broader crisis of the future, and therefore of history as a knowledge designed to make societies intelligible to themselves through analysis of their diachronic future.⁸

What comes next is our current regime: one in which — in our shared experience of everyday life — solely our present comes to the fore, hence why Hartog calls this mode of historicity presentism. One might postulate this condition as a particular kind of flattening of time and historical discourse in general, in which everything seems to relate to one another in a specific way, trapped in the web of a single temporal layer — that of the here-and-now. On the other hand, its availability is experienced in radically different ways depending on the place the experiencer occupies in social structures.

But let me first consider the elements constitutive of utopia — hope and resistance — and just after examining how, in their interaction with this formal framework proposed by Hartog, one can arrive at the utopian proper within the various historical manifestations of utopianism.

The non-existent genesis of utopianism

The genesis of utopianism is not some timeless, essential, or ideal mystery from which, by virtue of method, one might deduce a pure and primary image. It is formed step by step. A piece from here, one from there. Its aims remain intimately connected with the Zeitgeist, giving rise to the aspiration for radical otherness. The need for utopia is an outward manifestation of the need for hope, but also of the need for intellectual, and actual, resistance. Ernest Mandel argues that “hope belongs to the solid, immutable core of our anthropological specificity.”⁹

Anthropology, broadly defined, is the intersection of our species’ biological and social development. Thus, hope is thought of as a middle ground between our biological origin — a consequent of the evolutionary processes, and our cultural specificity — as a dynamic variable resonating in our cognitive, linguistic, and acting capacities. Its function, therefore, fits as a necessary complement to the need for the collective transmission and retransmission of meanings and significations. Hope, then, contributes to grasping and handling the human situation in its present particularities, as an extremely general, non-dividual, and signifying historical situation.

On the other hand, the constant realization of the historical process, as we know since Marx, is the continual confrontation of one against another, be it idea, group, or class. It is resistance, then, that presupposes hope and vice versa. Their interdependence, in an immanent sense, is the qualitative bifurcation of the process of utopianism that has already taken place — a point on which the multiplicity of possible solutions, of lines of becoming(s) and escape(s), depend.

Since we do not know, and cannot know, the truth of utopia’s genesis, we can reverse what has been said just now and thus think of utopianism as an articulation or particular externality, bringing in its wake actions — a collective goal-oriented praxis. More so, if utopianism, even if it has its precisely discoverable historical and particular birth, is not a fixed and complete thing-in-itself, but the constant and dynamic becoming of in-against-and-beyond any other thing claiming to be fixed and complete in itself.

It is, therefore, by its very definition, non-place because it negates the repression already presupposed in any place. The utopianist, on the other hand, in a particular way, fits into this non-place, an offspring of his fantasy or imagination, displacing them from the context whose change they long for. The reflexive reverie gives — not freely, of course, but in exchange for the hope-for and the resistance-against — the notion of the absence of all notions, for it draws us into the non-existent territory of absent domination. Something that the facticity of the world and reality does not allow, and whose repressiveness — alas! — is contained in every pre-conception.

Precisely because utopia, and even more utopianism, can be thought of as the concretely articulated expression of the hope-for and the resistance-against, any attempt at its definition is prematurely doomed to failure. Different social, political, economic, and cultural particularities — in a word, the context — evoke the need for a different formulation of utopian thought. But not only that. Different groups or collectivities, different authors or individuals, also postulate their demands on the form and content of both the hope-for and the resistance-against.

The very fact that I speak of hope-for and resistance-against in singular implies thinking of them as something in-themselves — as some frozen ideal or a one, essentially referring to another one. But they exist, of course, as multiplicities, as hopes, as resistances, not as some isolated singularity knowable in multiple ways and through multiple perspectives, but as the actuality of their multiplicities. On the other hand, hope-for and resistance-against are such especially when thought through the grapes of intersubjectivity. This is precisely why every utopia is often an intersection of this diversity, this manifold — economic, social, political, moral, etc.

Thus on either side of each of these ‘singularities’ is located its alignment with the unknown multiplicity. I’m talking here about two extremely bizarre equations. One might say they are not even proper equations, since de facto each of them is itself three equations in one. But these are precisely the kinds of equations we need to represent the hope and resistance fuelling utopianism.

As for the being of hope or resistance, to refer to them would be to think of them as objects. Yet they are not. Rather, they are an attitude towards an object: one which, in the first case, is non-existent, and in the second, the only thing that exists. Thus hope desires and its absolute object is precisely the satisfaction of desire. It seeks it as the lost child, the suffering youth, or the dying old man seeks the mother’s word and kiss. Resistance, on the other hand, is opposed precisely to loss, precisely to suffering, precisely to death.

If we want to think and relate to them philosophically (and outside of traditional objecthood), we must leave them open to the modalities of time. We need, then, a vulnerable interpretation of these two directions immanent to utopianism. We should treat them as open to a future which, contrary to the efforts of hopeful thought, contrary to the aspirations of the imaginative, dreaming monster, cannot be overtaken by either our knowledge or our ability to plan; and another present which, contrary to the efforts of resisting bodies, contrary to the struggle of finite beings, seems to be overtaken neither by our powers nor by our stubbornness.

But in the vulnerability of such an interpretation lurks the danger that the past that supposedly is will become something that supposedly is not. In interpreting the present and the future, we inevitably come into conflict with the past. All these reflections refer back to Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of the present. We are talking here, then, about a particular kind of recursion, constantly being shifted, evaluated, re-evaluated, and all over again.

Exposing this vulnerability, moreover, would mean uncovering hope as a kind of desire which, being turned toward what is coming, the not-yet, desires the absolute realization of itself. In this striving, hope seeks to diminish all possible reifications of desire, and with that, all that precedes such an act. Resistance, on the other hand, is an attempt to confront — within the present — the unbearable facticity of the world. Hope and resistance, bind together, are — in a quasi-ontological sense and insofar as one can speak of ‘precision in the definitions’ — the peaceless striving for a world after the end of hopes and resistances.

Such a limit, obviously, can only actualize itself in reality, and, therefore, it is precisely the reality that must become other. To put it yet differently, hope is the non-empirically given horizon of the present, and resistance is the possibility of the empirically given genesis of the future. Utopianism should be, therefore, thought of as an embodied imagery of hope and resistance, along with the longing for their imminent end. It is the thing without which every outward-oriented gaze remains empty.

To trace the genealogy of utopia, then, I will have to consider what has incited the hope-for and has ignited the resistance-against, but also the specific modes of historicity that were at work at the time, triggering the centrifugal powers, their fusion, their amalgam.

In forthcoming essays, I will focus on specific works, while in the penultimate and final one — on a multitude of such works, representing an entire epoch and its specific spirit. The materials are chosen according to their accessibility, as well as my (subjective) preferences. Nevertheless, I will note in my introductions how each work corresponds to others of the same or a period of proximity.

If the reader feels that I am about to endorse overly romantic instances of utopianism, let me state in advance that even if I wished to examine its unfortunate deviations in detail, the scope of those future expositions would not allow me to do so. The details and particulars, then, will remain for another time.

Hopefully — soon.

Notes

1. Utopian and Post-Utopian Paradigms in Classical Political Thought by Ryan K. Balot; Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 16, №2 (Fall,2008), pp. 75–90.

2. Undoubtedly, utopianism thrives in the soil of the philosophy of history, art, and language with the same joy that it does in political philosophy. Also noteworthy is the specifically messianic or eschatological character of utopian thinking, which brings it into the research domain of the philosophy of religion. It is an exceedingly productive intersection of those fields. Undoubtedly, utopianism is an expression of those discreet lines, threads picked from these various fields. In different times and contexts, utopias themselves, however, are dominated by each of those fields in different ways and (in)consistencies. The scope of such a reflection, and its exposition, cannot extend over all these relational fields of participation and complicity, although certain moments of them are inevitably identified and reflected on.

3. Reinhart Koselleck, The Temporalization of Utopia in The Layers of Time.

4. I far prefer this historical designation of the era to the ‘Age of Exploration,’ insofar as the latter mystifies the overall mindset of the so-called “explorers,” namely discoverers and therefore owners.

5. Koselleck, op. cit.

6. Ursula Le Guin, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place To Be.

7. Francois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time.

8. What Time Will It Be After Capitalism? by Christophe Bonneuil.

9. ‘Anticipation and Hope as Categories of Historical Materialism’ (2002) by Mandel, E., Historical Materialism 10, p. 247.