Piotr Gwiazda

English Department
University of Miami, Coral Gables
pgwiazda@mail.as.miami.edu

 

Review of: “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Special Exhibition at the New York Public Library. October 2000-January 2001. Exhibition website: <http://www.nypl.org/utopia>.

 

A few years ago, I told an English professor (who regularly teaches Thomas More’s Utopia in his Renaissance literature courses) that I was preparing to give a paper at a conference of the Society for Utopian Studies. He asked me where the meeting was scheduled to take place. I answered, “Montreal.” We discussed other matters for a while and then, just as I was about to leave his office, the professor said to me: “You realize you gave the wrong answer to my question.” “What question?” “About that Utopian Society’s meeting. The right answer should have been nowhere.” He smiled. “The utopians meet nowhere, eh?”

 

Between October 2000 and January 2001, utopia was on view in New York–in a special exhibition at the New York Public Library entitled “Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World.” Jointly organized by the library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the exhibition featured more than 550 objects, including books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, maps, photographs, films, and assorted ephemera. One part of the exhibition represented manifestations of utopian thought and sentiment from antiquity through the end of the nineteenth century. Another represented the twentieth century and now continues in the virtual space of the library’s website (<http://www.nypl.org/utopia>), where it examines the internet as the next “New World” of the apparently imperishable utopian impulse.

 

This is a large exhibition that requires several hours of concentrated study, since every item on display is worth one’s time. The show encompasses only the tradition of Western thought within which utopia acquired its own history of evolution, its own great narrative, so to speak. Assembling an exhibition like this is in itself an attempt to create a logic of continuity of utopian ideology and praxis that begins with the biblical Garden of Eden and ends with the metaworlds of cyberspace. What comes in between is various, fascinating, and often unexpected; it includes gulags and concentration camps, as well as the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the book that gave the genre its name, one finds, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s original version of the Declaration of Independence; Voltaire’s manuscript of Candide opened to the El Dorado chapter; and nineteenth-century cartoons ridiculing Cabet, Proudhon, and other social visionaries. Overall, the exhibition presents a quirky history of utopian imagination dominated by the human desire to improve everyday reality and create a better place on earth.

 

The New York Public Library exhibition included two transparent plexiglass reading chambers, in which one could peacefully reflect on a number of utopian texts, such as paperback editions of Paine’s Common Sense, Butler’s Erewhon, and Huxley’s Brave New World. The chambers were intended to allow one to appreciate the role of the utopian impulse in Western history and imagination, but they actually turned out to be a strangely disconcerting experience–indicative perhaps of the astonishing ubiquity of the genre, if one thinks of utopia as a genre. After several hours spent in the mixed company of Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, and H. G. Wells, one realizes that utopia affects all levels of human experience and is present in nearly every form of artistic, political, and religious expression.

 

This might be, in fact, the fundamental premise of the utopian narrative: utopia is the essential, unfulfilled dream of humanity that continues to affect us, but at the same time remains very difficult to pin down. The most important distinction one could draw between the exhibition’s numerous manifestations of the utopian tendency is between utopias imagined and utopias attempted. Utopia has always been a matter of both theory and practice. The etymological root of the word leaves it up to us to decide whether utopia is supposed to be a place that is good (eu topos) or a place that does not exist (ou topos). From the logical standpoint, the two possibilities cancel each other out. Thomas More’s paradox may have been just a scholarly joke, but it still holds the world in doubt over the real nature of the utopian project. When one speaks about utopia as a place that is or can potentially be good, one considers it from the positive, practical standpoint. When one speaks about utopia as a place that does not exist, or exists only as the product of the imagination, one understands it in terms of negation or criticism of the reality at hand. The exhibition verifies that utopia simultaneously exists and does not exist; it is a valid instrument of social and technological change, but it is also a permanently unfulfilled fantasy of a better life.

 

This paradoxical status of utopia is also its crucial problem. In Plato’s The Republic (which has a prominent place at the exhibition), Socrates paints a picture of the perfect community while also insisting that the success of his argument depends on the imaginative cooperation of his interlocutors: “suppose we imagine a state coming into being before our eyes” (55); “imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground” (227). Socrates, Glaucon, and the other speakers in Plato’s text work out a scheme or plan for the ideal republic that, nevertheless, remains largely within the imaginary, rather than realistic, sphere. The success of the vision relies on the intensity of supposing, conceiving, devising, imagining, or simply desiring the ideal society. The conversation is neither idle talk, and nor is it a speech-act that would imply immediate action. At one point in his discussion, Socrates refers to “a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and, seeing it, to found one in himself. But whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter; for this is the only commonwealth in whose politics he can ever take part” (319-20). So much for utopia and reality. When Socrates alludes to the fact that man can build a perfect commonwealth “in himself,” he really only allows for the possibility of an imagined utopia. Other representatives of this particular understanding of utopia in the exhibition include descriptions of the Golden Age (represented by the appropriate section of a fifteenth-century manuscript of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and the Land of Cockaigne; and several Christian utopias such as the Garden of Eden, St. Augustine’s City of God, medieval manuscripts of the Book of Revelation, and the New Jerusalem. Literary and philosophical utopias written by More, Francis Bacon, Tomasso Campanella, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, and others remain fictions prima facie and as a whole they remind one of what Hegel once said in Philosophy of History (Engels quotes it on the first page of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific): “Since the sun had been in the firmament, and the planets circled around him, the sight had never been seen of man standing upon his head–i.e. on the Idea–and building reality after this image” (31-32). For Hegel, political changes brought forth by the French Revolution constituted the first sign that human beings were after all going to build reality after an idea–but the exhibition verifies that people stood on their heads quite a long time before the French revolution, and long afterwards.

 

What distinguishes Socrates’s vision from Aristotle’s (mainly in Politics) is precisely the mode of discussion. Aristotle envisions his ideal community from the example of an already existing polis, Athens, and his main preoccupation lies in the possible improvement of the city. Plato constructs his Republic upon an idea; Aristotle forms his upon reality. Plato relies on imagination; Aristotle relies on reason. Other “practical” examples of the utopian impulse in the exhibition feature fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps and documents describing the newly discovered American continent. Among these one can find Christopher Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand announcing his discoveries in the New World. Soon after its discovery, the new continent was hailed by the Europeans as the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, a new Earthly Paradise, and an ideal place for a utopian community. Subsequent events and experiences evidently put these ideas to rest, but something genuinely exciting is still detectable in these first documents of America’s conquest. Another good example of combining theory and practice is a set of designs for ideal cities, many of them undertaken by Italian Renaissance architects. Few of these cities ever materialized; the exception was the town of Palmanova near Venice, whose sixteenth-century plan is also on display. The revolutionary ideals of equality and reform constitute an even more practical portion of the exhibition. The American and French Revolutions are given appropriate place and focus; they are complemented by the religious and secular utopian communities established in the nineteenth century. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man is included, and so are charts illustrating widespread changes in weights, measures, and the calendar proposed by the French revolutionaries. Religious communities such as the Shakers and the Mormons are also represented, as are the secular communities of Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana and Etienne Cabet’s Icaria in Illinois (these include photographs, drawings, prints, etc.).

 

The twentieth century saw the flourishing of science fiction, a form of utopianism primarily occupied with advances in science and technology in both the near and distant future. As if to illustrate this new direction, a full size replica of the robot used in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis stood guard at the entrance to the room featuring the second half of the original exhibition. Twentieth-century utopias also differ from their predecessors in another aspect. It is only in this century that we clearly observe the emergence of a troubling counter-genre, dystopia, in theory and in practice. Utopia, it turns out, is a two-edged sword. The fascination with progress, technology, and machines is represented by the Futurist movement in art and literature that came to prominence in Fascist Italy. The euphoric propaganda of the Soviet and Nazi regimes is juxtaposed with the sordid reality these social systems produced: gulags, gas chambers, and concentration camps.

 

The latter part of the twentieth century offers yet another perspective on the utopian impulse and its role in Western civilization. The current debate on advantages and disadvantages of the internet continues these utopian debates, with cyberspace as another locus of utopian possibility. Cyberspace, among other things, creates a potential for transforming oneself into alternate personalities based on viritual, rather than physical, identity. It allows human beings to participate in online communities that are not inhibited by exigencies of space and time. Cyberspace is also said to eliminate discrimination; it is a forum of free expression, promoting democratic principles of equality and tolerance. This is why virtual space is regarded as potentially utopian space. In the words of John Perry Barlow, author of A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, “ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” The availability of e-mail, avatars, and chat rooms offers a new perspective on human communications and on human existence in general. The flip side to this, of course, is apparent: the facility with which alternate personalities can be created online may lead to isolation, alienation, and deception. Is the internet a great equalizer? To some extent, yes–but there still exists a potential for discrimination and stratification. Consider: cyberspace is available to millions of people, but only if these people have access to a personal computer, modem, and service provider, a condition which automatically exludes a tremendously large precentage of the global population.

 

The exhibition’s website offers an abundant selection of materials from the original show, and it includes both text and pictures. It also contains a very impressive collection of links to other utopian and cyberspace resources. The website is divided into several sections: Sources, Other Worlds, Utopia in History, Dreams and Nightmares, and Metaworlds. The last section offers a complex engagement with the relationship between utopia and cyberspace, with discussions of parallels between developments in utopian thought and the history of the internet, debates on the internet as a possible utopia, and additional remarks from utopian scholars and experts. In most of these comments one can detect, unsurprisingly, a skeptical resistance to the idea of the internet as an utopian enterprise. “Real” life is still the only life, most utopianists argue, and they consider the internet as something advantageous only to the extent that it makes our real lives easier. Most often, they regard the internet as an advanced form of communication technology, currently fascinating because of its novelty and potential, but likely to feel less utopia-like the more we become accustomed to it. In fact, the whole discussion of cyberspace as utopia may eventually fade away when we begin to take it for granted, just as we eventually took steam engine trains, automobiles, telephones, and television for granted. These technological advances changed our lives, to be sure, but at a pace much slower and in ways more complex than either their enthusiasts or enemies probably would have liked to imagine. At this point, a kind of coolheaded enthusiasm among utopian commentators still prevails, even though some of them are concerned with the dangers of cyberspace that make the internet seem closer to a possible dystopia. In a small way, viewers of the website can also contribute to the debate by taking part in a poll on the relationship between utopia and cyberspace. Although the website is potentially available to millions of people, only approximately 30 have taken part in the survey so far!

 

Even before the publication of More’s book in 1516, utopia existed in the millenarian visions of Old Testament prophets, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and the poems of Ovid. Throughout the centuries, humanity has confronted remarkable ideas that convey the utopian impulse, including stories, novels, and political, philosophical, and scientific treatises, and there have been numerous attempts to put these ideas into practice. Some of these permanently altered the face of humanity, while others faded into obscurity. Poised between myth and prophecy, utopia denotes both a recovery of the past and a promise of the future. Although it does not have a defined social role, utopia frequently intends to set a model of society that could be imitated or at least considered as an alternative to the present conditions. Does this mean that utopia is essentially progressive? Can dreams be productive? One is reminded of the good-hearted courtier Gonzalo in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose fanciful and candid refusal to confront the reality at hand produces a conventional and necessarily self-contradictory definition of an ideal commonwealth: if he were its king, he would allow “no sovereignty” (II.i.162). If Gonzalo’s commonwealth had ever materialized, it would have been mercilessly refuted by reality the way it was refuted in so many tragic instances in the twentieth century. Utopian consciousness is bound to be whimsical, arbitrary, and sometimes outright dangerous–which may be why so many utopian experiments have ended as dystopias.

 

To return to my anecdote, during my trip to Montreal for the conference of the Society for Utopian Studies I was filled with apprehensions about various Etienne Cabets and Theodore Hertzkas that I half-expected to encounter there. What I found instead was a group of serious thinkers and activists. Many papers I heard were extremely stimulating, but none surpassed my own co-panelist’s presentation on teaching the issues of environmental sustainability to inner-city college freshmen. Here was someone addressing authentic problems and finding excellent practical solutions to them. In the end, the conference revealed to me the true nature of utopia. The best riposte to those who say utopia can only be found nowhere is that, by the same token, it might also be found anywhere.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barlow, John Perry. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996. <http://eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>.
• Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Trans. Edward Aveling. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1935.
• Plato. The Republic. Trans. F. MacDonald Cornford. London: Oxford UP, 1945.
• Shakespeare, William.The Riverside Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.