Istvan Csicsery-Ronay

Science Fiction Studies
DePauw University
icronay@depauw.edu

 

Mutopia

 

People move. We become refugees from violence, and exploitation, and poverty, and boredom. This has happened before. But before, we believed we would settle, or resettle, or die trying. Now we go around and around. We no longer believe there is settlement. Painful for the Enlightenment, for the point of the freedom of movement was to arrive at a destination: an ultimate home better than the birth-home. And the Enlightenment was to bring the ultimate home even to the provinces. It worked so well that now, even when folks live in one place for generations, the world migrates under them. The differences that once were ideologized into essences or principles are recognized to be mutable. High-speed computer and communications technologies have linked different peoples so closely that only “irrationally” protected cultural secrets can survive becoming currencies and stories in the information market. Fill in your own CNNtelepoliticsGoldCardtransnationalfrequentflyerhomeshoppingworldbeatprogrammedtrading HungarianhiphopcrackinBenares story. Bet on it: your parody is empirical, prime-time, your high-rez muezzins chant “in the name of Allah, The Compassionate, the Digital.”¹ This is the Age of Absolute Oxymoron. Hang ten, this is a big one.

 

Mutability is no longer about the physical body’s sad corruption, nor about the freshness of the New Thing. Enter Tao, exit Reason. To live in this flux, Zen demands mu, “unasking the question”–for the question invariably asks to preserve the unpreservable, in language of the reified present. What shall we call our culture of coping in this tide of historical samsara? Let us call it: mutopia.

 

The Mountain of the Night

 

When wanderings on the smooth spaces become intolerable, survivors seek magic mountains; spaces that become mountains by rising suddenly; or villages that disappear down a dead-end branch.

 

The central plateau of southern Africa was ravaged for most of the 1820s by vast hordes of displaced peoples wandering from place to place, pillaging and devouring others to survive. The greatest of these groups, Mantatee’s Horde, numbered over 50,000. A small Sutu clan, led by their young leader, Msheshwe, was forced out of its area.

 

Msheshwe was appalled at the destruction by which he was surrounded, and alone refused to join in the general pillaging. He gathered his clan, perhaps 2,000 people, and led them south, to the foothills of the Drakensberg (his grandfather Peete was eaten by cannibals on the way), and here he found a most unusual mountain. Thasa Bosiu--"The Mountain of the Night"--was a flat-topped hill in a deep, hidden valley with 150 acres of good pasture and a spring on the summit. The plateau was surrounded by a steep scarp with only three access trails. Msheshwe established his clan on top and supplied each trail with enormous mounds of boulders, which could be rolled down to break up attackers. Perched on this stronghold, he formed the only island of sanity in a sea of madness, and over the years was able to build his clan into the Basuto nation. He pieced it together from debris cast up in the general havoc, offering succor to the fragmented groups that eddied and swirled through the foothills. His security was greatly enhanced by a carefully planted rumor that the mountain grew to an immense height at night and subsided to its normal 300 feet during the day.²

Solvitur ambulando

 

The past is the natural place to look for the seeds of utopia. The future writes its record into the past. First, idealize pre-industrial agriculture–organicism, closeness to the earth, stewardship, co-operation. When it turns out that agriculture inspires oppressive customs to order settledness, the quest is for hunter-gatherness–even closer to the earth, which h-gs do not try to transform, living in happy communication with the animals, on the borders of faery. But h-gs are inclined to become herders, pastoralists, and the question of turf perpetually incites war over property and grazing privileges. Nay, the very war-machine. Where to next? Neanderthals, perhaps, long maligned, but possibly gentle giants wiped out by aggressive Cro-Magnons (i.e., us). Or even the earliest hominids in the Olduvai Eden.

 

Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, reconstructs the epitome of this mobile paleo-utopia in his account of the songlines of Australian aboriginal peoples. According to Chatwin’s story, these peoples map the whole of the continent in songs that are to be sung while doing walkabouts, solitary treks that simultaneously restore the physical memory of the land to the human mind and insure that the society of spirits is kept alive and in touch with humanity. Each social group has its own songs, marking its territory–but there are peaceable overlaps: to cross another’s territory one must learn that people’s songs, languages. In essence, the aboriginal songlines both describe and contain the earth. They are a form of ambulatory Aleph, existing without cities, walls, farms or war-machines. Scarcity produces plenitude–Chatwin’s is the acme of the idealization of the desert, where each stone and creosote bush has an individuality that also helps the human mind orient itself, locate itself, and by doing so gives the world a definite location. Plums do not drop into our mouths, as in paleo-Sumer or the Abyssinian garden. In the desert, creation and art are not gifts, but work–work with gifts.

 

My father’s castle

 

My father’s native village, Zala, lies five kilometers from Tab, in the southwestern Hungarian county of Somogy. To reach it from Budapest, one takes a train to the resort town of Siófok on Lake Balaton, then climbs onto a county local, and passes a dozen villages until reaching the town of Tab. From there one either waits for one of the intermittent buses, takes one of the town’s half dozen taxicabs, or just walks, altogether about eight kilometers from the Tab station to the center of Zala.

 

On a fine summer day, it is a sweet amble. The region, the valley of Little Koppány river, is a country of high, wooded hills rising out of rolling wheatfields. The road, which runs west out of Tab, is hedged with lombardy poplars. Poppies bloom in the roadside ditches. The sky is dramatic, in a homely way; Adriatic breezes mingle with the easterly winds of Europe. It’s a shady region. Even in hot summers cool, dark woods are never far away.

 

The road to Zala is a spur off the main road, a long cul de sac ascending gradually up a gentle hill, through the tree-dense village, to the wheatfields at the northern perimeter. The three hundred or so villagers live from farming, hogs, and the vineyards; many commute to Tab for work and school. The quiet is dense, a pleasant pressure, like the cool damp when a hiker suddenly descends into a dale. The sounds don’t vary: yelping dogs, the muffled snarl of motorbikes and tractors on distant hills, the comically rhapsodic song of European robins. Enormous trees cool the air, which is heavy with the scent of boxwoods. There are no stores, no advertisements, few signs of any kind. A bus-stop, a couple traffic icons, an emblem of the national nature conservancy, and a plaque identifying the museum of the 19th Hungarian artist, Mihály Zichy, who was the proprietor of this and surrounding villages for most of the last century.

 

The museum is Zala’s only worldly attraction. A dozen or so tourists come per week. The Zichy museum occupies about a third of the long, L-shaped, one-story manor house, which the villagers call “The Castle”; it houses Zichy’s studio, many of his paintings and drawings, his library, and objects he collected in his travels. The rest of the building was the family’s living quarters, before it was expropriated by the Communist regime in 1947. Then it was a village-council headquarters, then a cultural center, and finally, it was left alone to house the museum’s caretaker in a benignly neglected rustic hermitage. That caretaker was the artist’s granddaughter, my father’s mother, and so my grandmother. The Castle was my father’s house.

 

In Turkestan

 

For Chatwin, the fall is simply the decision to migrate toward the garden, the oasis, the apple orchard. If you do not go way back to the songlines, finding one’s location becomes the model of abstraction. Gurdjieff describes something like this in Meetings with Remarkable Men, in his account of a journey to a secret monastery in Turkestan.

 

In Turkestan there are many of these monuments, which are very cleverly placed; without them, we travelers would have no possibility of orienting ourselves in this chaotic, roadless region. They are usually erected on some elevated spot so that, if one knows the general plan of their placement, they can be seen a long way off, sometimes even from a score of miles. They are nothing more than single high blocks of stone or simply long poles driven into the ground.Among the mountain folk there exist various beliefs concerning these monuments, such as the following: that at this spot some saint was either buried or taken up to heaven, that he killed the ‘seven-headed dragon’ there, or that something else extraordinary happened to him in that place. Usually the saint in whose name the monument was erected is considered the protector of the entire surrounding countryside, and when a traveler has successfully overcome any difficulty natural to the region–that is, escaped an attack by brigands or wild beasts, or has safely crossed a mountain or river, or surmounted any other danger–it is all attributed to the protection of this saint. And so any merchant, pilgrim or other traveler who has passed through these dangers brings to the monument some kind of offering in gratitude.

 

It became an established custom to bring as an offering something which, as is believed there, would mechanically remind the saint of the prayers of the person who brought the offering. Accordingly, they bring gifts such as a piece of cloth, the tail of an animal or something else of the kind, so that, with one end tied or fastened to the monument, the other end can flutter freely in the wind.

 

These things, moving in the wind, make the spot where the monument is placed visible to us travelers from a great distance. Whoever knows approximately the arrangement of these monuments can locate one of them from some elevated spot and make his way in its direction, and from it to the next, and so on. Without knowing the general pattern of their arrangement it is almost impossible to travel through these regions. There are no well-defined roads or footpaths and, if some paths do form themselves, then, owing to the sudden changes of weather and the ensuing snowstorms, they very quickly change or are totally effaced. So if these landmarks were not there, a traveller trying to find suitable paths would become so confused that even the most delicate compass would be of no help to him. It is possible to pass through these regions only by establishing the direction from monument to monument.³

 

In this remarkable fusion of geography and allegory, Gurdjieff describes what Chatwin might have considered the origin of the fall–attributable less to human sin than to the restive demons of geology who created mountains, the first of the striated spaces; for in the mountains, the subtlety of the desert’s immanence and the precision of the walkabout becomes the drama of quest, transcendence and abstract monumentality. The markers are memorials to beings who have negotiated terrific ordeals and who can be mechanically induced to protect travelers who are essentially aliens wandering in the mountainous void. No singers, no songs, no step-for-step tracing and recreation of the path. Here the path is contingent, no compass can help, only the marker-monuments flapping in the wind on the promontories can guide the traveler. Gurdjieff’s own spiritual journey is congruent with his physical one. The monastery is the reward for an arduous and mysterious journey. The utopian home must be earned, by quest and ordeal.

 

Home is homelessness

 

Utopias may depict smiling toothpastes, sex with commodities (commodomy),⁴ the perfect organization of time and production, Carmelites discussing Powerbooks, radios of enlightenment, solar-powered metropoli–but they are not the same as the idyllic Land of Cocaigne. Utopias are images of home attained through rational agreement, worked-for, not merely found or granted. Post-dysfunctional. The relationship between the laws or customs of utopia and the utopians is an image of the human family, liberated from feudal violence, the Church, capitalism, collectivism, military occupation, Oedipal miseries, the recursive archetypes of mythology played out generation after generation in most families. Utopias are the image of alienation overcome. So said Ernst Bloch:

 

Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is, grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming, and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and where no one has yet been--home.⁵

 

This is the vision of bourgeois happiness, the spiritual joy of the rationalist, the terminal of history’s line. Unlike the idyll, where childhood pleasures absolve folks of adulthood, mortality, responsibility, work, self-consciousness, self-discipline, utopia is the home of enlightened division of labor, of happy abnegation of narcissism for the higher joy of collective harmony. It is life under the good father, or the good family council. Work is not only necessary, it is the highest joy of creating one’s own home constantly–redeemed production-lines replace songlines. Bloch inverts the Freudian slander that utopia is merely the sublimation of infantile erotic fantasies; for Bloch, those fantasies are merely inadequately understood messages from the telos of human existence. Nostalgia is but the anticipation of home when found.

 

The idyll, even if it is the seed of utopia, is an enemy. For the idyll obviates all work but the work to create its conditions; after that, it’s all automatic–nature will nurture us. Even so, without an idyll, utopia is nothing: without a model of nature “redeemed” by care, second nature cannot be imagined.

 

Jocoserious

 

The dialectic of Utopia depends on a concrete ambiguity, a double introjection. On the one hand, there is social criticism, the negation of current bad social organization; on the other, an alternative model. The reader/player should feel that both are positive, concrete commentaries on social conditions and social ideals–and so they should be taken seriously, applied to conditions outside the text. On the other hand they are also parts of an aesthetic game, a playful demonstration of the limits of the conception of the real, by showing some limits inscribed in the utopian paradoxes and oxymorons.

 

Two visions correspond to Utopia: on the one hand, a free play of imagination in its indefinite expansion measured only by the desire, itself infinite, of happiness in a space where the moving frontiers of its philosophical and political fictions would be traced; on the other hand, the exactly opposite closed totality rigorously coded with all the constraints and obligations of the law binding and closing a place with insuperable frontiers that would guarantee its harmonious functioning.⁶

 

So social criticism cuts against the aesthetic game, each undermines and complements the other, neutralizing and fusing at rapid intervals. Each of these attitudes vibrates in and out of existence. No utopia appears without it, though their constructors might wish them to.

 

Utopias allow the aesthetic and political attitudes, which are usually mutually exclusive universes of discourse, to play with each other, to spin around, and spin with each other. (Utopias are partial to circular motions. A new traveler is expected to make a circuit.) They question each other, without resolving things. They do not, even so, freeze into a reified dualism, which would merely trivialize both the aesthetic and the political by showing how pretentious they are as attitudes, each pretending to be complete without the other.

 

A utopia is extremely serious play. It implies that there is no reduction beyond tension, beyond vibration–and that social-political action (the correction of wrongs in reality, etc.) and aesthetic constructions are both required, and the desirable reality is the one in which both will be possible and inseparable. Utopia, consequently, is only imaginable when social-historical moments converge with artistic-historical ones, when political action and art are considered equally vital.

 

Utopia is always vanguard literature, but never avant-garde. Vanguard because it uses the most advanced contemporary concepts, aspirations, and vocabularies–cultural, social, scientific-technological, historical. Not avant-garde because is strives for clarity in its concepts; it is impermissible to fog up the intellectual game of carrying ideas to extremes with the anarchy of innovative expressions. It is the monument of times when imagination is thought compatible with political language.

 

Changing Utopia?

 

Can utopia change? May utopia change? In that renaissance of utopian discussions of the ’60s and early ’70s, these questions haunted attempts to articulate the goal of social revolution. Many of us would spend days and nights listening to philo-utopians talking about “utopian drive,” “utopian impulse,” “utopian energies.” The idea of a community of reason without force was displaced into the deep inner zone, the good psyche, the good unconscious, where it became a version of the life-principle. This was supposed to be a gain, moving the focus of utopia from mechanical world-historical forces or the social laws that Reason impels us to obey, to the zone of self and desire. Individual agency was restored, and utopias increasingly seemed to be about the fulfillment of the deepest personal longings. Rather than seeking to attain harmony through a rational, disciplined repression of personal desire for the higher social good–secularized caritas and agape–as was characteristic of classical utopias, good was to come of the recognition that one’s personal desires are one with others’. The logic of desire might be mystical, or psychoanalytic or Rousseauian–but from wherever the apparatus was derived, this logic pointed toward some supra-dialectical point where reason and desire meet, and the parallel lines, so long separated by the evil petty lords, would embrace and celebrate their union.

 

Classical reason was stable, steady-state, immutable. Even if one could not inhabit its steadiness in one’s mutable body, the classical rationalist could be sure that it would not change, by definition. But desire–Dionysus and Eros–is changing and changeable. If Utopia is to be built by the contractors of desire, what is to keep desire from changing instantly to something new, dialectically “other,” unanticipated, leaving the city of accomplished love as dead as Chaco Canyon? What limits could be justified without a police force, and ultimately a police state. When will the contractors ever complete the job and just let us move in?

 

The ’60s was a period of bona fide utopian energy–hundreds of thousands of people were actively trying to imagine an ideal society–thousands of theories, theologies, housing arrangements, mass movements for social change were created, reflecting the proliferating multiplicities of desire, and not only in advanced capitalist societies. In this milieu, utopian writing became more self-conscious and self-questioning than it had been since More. Utopian themes brought about a renaissance of science fiction (SF); the dystopian tradition that had dominated Western social fantasy for half a century now gave place to moral fantasies that engaged the dystopian critiques, and tried to create images of drastic social progress that were neither naive nor cynical.

 

The ironic, or meta-utopias tried to imagine how the worst sins of human social life could be redeemed, while simultaneously allowing for the very faculty that inspired utopian longing in the first place: the will to change. Looking back, few of the works described as utopian from this period still strike one as utopian–the usual suspects: Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Delany’s Triton, Russ’ The Female Man, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and the others. They seem more stories about the difficulty of conceiving an organized, self-administered ideal society than images of consummated societies. But did they ever claim to do the latter? Where would these writers–women, gays, non-Europeans–turn for such images? The utopian heyday in SF was in fact on the cusp of mutopia, when voices that had previously been excluded and utterly de-differentiated in the classical utopias undertook to write the story from the outside, to demonstrate its limits.

 

An artist of exile

 

My father is not an ironic man. He has had two main goals in life: to represent high liberal ideals for his nation, and to preserve his ancestral home. Despite forty years of exile in the United States, he has done well. Though he was the last heir of the ancestral lands, in the mid-40s, he participated in a major land reform, keeping only three villages, two of which, Zics and Zala, were the ancient family seats. After the end of World War II, he joined the government that defeated the Communists in open elections, and he was imprisoned with the leadership when that government was overthrown in 1947. With my mother and sister (I was not born yet) he escaped to Austria, and after wandering through postwar Europe, eventually found asylum in the US.

 

My father was not an immigrant. For forty years he lived in the US anticipating the political changes that would allow him to return to his home. For most of my adult life, I knew him as an artist of exile. He never adopted US citizenship, preferring to be stateless. He never bought a house. He remained current in Hungarian political matters, and instructed my sister and me in Hungarian language and culture, so that when we returned we would be able to take our “rightful place” in the Hungarian elite without missing a step. He vowed not to set foot in the land until the Russian occupation troops had left. In 1989 he returned after free elections had been held.

 

He immediately set about realizing his two goals. He became actively involved in rehabilitating the memory of the 1945-47 democratic government, and he set about recovering his house, Zala.

 

The axis

 

The first records of Zala’s existence, and the presence of my father’s family, date from the last years of the 13th century, but historians have projected them back at least to the Mongol invasions of 1241 and probably to the Magyar settlement of the Danube basin in 896. One can surmise that the family has owned and lived on the land in this region for about a thousand years, surviving the Mongol, Turkish, Hapsburg, and Russian occupations, and many periods of domestic chaos. The Hungarian historical ideal, which is basically the self-image of the progressive nobles who constructed its dominant narrative, is balanced between pride at outlasting historical catastrophes, and pride at constructing vibrant modernities. Putatively, Zala was a quiet and excellent model that a great artist built against historical catastrophe through his art and his stewardship.

 

An American homesteader may be absolutely devoted to his land because it represents his personal labor and independence. But to the heir of a thousand-year old property the feeling has little to do with labor, the body, with personal will. The place is a shrine to continuity, to endurance, which with time takes on the character of necessity, even fate. The heir becomes merely a vessel of the experiment in immortality. To break the link is inconceivably shameful. The village, land and house are vertical spaces, they extend through historical time, but their axis is stronger than a backbone. The most striking thing about Zala is its population of towering chestnuts and oaks. But progressives, beyond merely preserving the past, are expected to improve it. Putatively more important than economic innovations in farming techniques was the improvement of the national mentality, and Zichy performed admirably in this respect, turning the family’s endurance into art and worldly fame. For family, nation, and class, Zala is not only a physical location, but a representative one.

 

Tired of trees

 

Alternatively, the thousand-year old past is a haunting. To accept it is to be elected among the ghosts.

 

To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses. We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much.⁷

Big Flood, Little Flood

 

This is a story of patrimony and patriarchy. I do have a mother, whom I love, but hers is another story, a very different one from the one I must tell you now. Yet this is less a story of maleness as opposed to femaleness, fathers as opposed to mothers, landlords versus villagers, or the nobility versus the misera contribuens plebs, than it is about the desire to establish and hold onto a place of one’s own on the banks of a world that flows like a great stream, and the suspicion that the banks are merely slower channels of the stream.

 

But I will tell this much. My mother was born in one of the smooth spaces, the northeastern edge of the Hungarians lowlands, where a tangle of rivers feed into the Tisza. Her father died when she was very young, and she lived with her mother and six siblings in a plain village within sight of the Carpathians. As a girl, she watched the rivers overrun their banks in a great flood, submerging villages, vineyards, orchards and forests for a hundred miles around. These floods were matters of legend. Villages are named for them: Big Flood and Little Flood, for example. Ever since, floods inspire special terror and pity in her.

 

Taidu

 

Like nomadology, utopia is also the opposite of history. Let’s be clear, utopia is the nomads’ dream world. Here are excerpts of Polo’s description of the new capital built by Kublai Khan, Taidu, the present-day Beijing.

 

Taidu is built in the form of a square with all its sides of equal length and a total circumference of twenty-four miles....I assure you that the streets are so broad and straight that from the top of the wall above one gate you can see along the whole length of the road to the gate opposite. The city is full of fine mansions, inns, and dwelling houses. All the way down the sides of every main street there are booths and shops of every sort. All the building sites throughout the city are square and measured by the rule; and on every site stand large and spacious mansions with ample courtyards and gardens....Every site or block is surrounded by good public roads; and in this way the whole interior of the city is laid out in squares like a chess-board with such masterly precision that no description can do justice to it.⁸

 

Kublai Khan had Taidu built from scratch, across the river from the old city, from which he had much of the population transferred to the new one. The palace at the center of the imperial city shows similar symmetry. What would possess the Khan of Khans, heir of Genghis Khan and ruler of the vastest, flattest empire in the world, the Nomad chosen by God, to build a city so geometrical, regular, abstract? I have only hypotheses.

 

We know that the Central Asian nomads organized their armies according to strict symmetries of unit number, and deployed armies in all four directions. The Huns are even said to have color-coded their armies, with whole armies riding horses of the color appropriate to the direction against which they were moving. Like Assyrian cities, Taidu was built in the image of the camp.⁹ Clearly this is an aspect of the war-machine. At the same time, nomads of the smooth spaces were free to build cities according to whatever design they pleased. Thus they–the Uighurs, the Mongols, others–could construct cities that were already abstractions, perfectly imagined, since very little in the steppes’ topography would force constraints. Unconstrained, the despot-nomads created utopian cities in reality. They lacked only utopian humans.

 

World Upgrade (was: Cyborg Dreams)

 

The cyborg is the solidest citizen of Mutopia.

 

It has been ten years since Donna Haraway published one of the most influential essays on the postmodern condition, “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway was able, as no one else on the Left was at the time, to make radical feminists and their allies aware that the staid dualistic categories of humanist moral-political analysis were fast becoming completely obsolete. In a world hellbent on universal upgrades and recombinations, it was no longer credible to oppose the natural, the organic, and the female, on the one hand, to the artificial, the scientific-technological, and the male on the other. Politics would have to be rethought to work with machines, and with the demolition of categorical distinctions between genders, between animals and humans, between artifice and nature. Accompanying the utopianism of science into the ash-can of history would be all salvation mythologies, with their mystical plots: from innocent origin (idyll) to Fall (history) to apocalyptic salvation (Utopia or Bust).

 

The cyborg is a perfect mythology for generations that witness not only the collapse of the corrupt cloudcastle ideologies of the Western tradition, but also all memory of the moral advantages it might once have afforded through its conceptions of equality and empirical judgment. Haraway’s Manifesto does a little bit of warning about the dangers of the cyborg-economy, and a lot of magical encouragement about the way the new technologies will liberate women from the phallogocentric God-story. Fathers and The Father play a major role in Haraway’s deeply psychoanalytic reduction of Western history. She is a forerunner, unable to enter the cyborg Canaan because she remembers her Fathers too well. The cyborg descendants (of all genders, not just female) begin with a blue screen–oppressive patriarchal super-egos are so clearly absurd that the very idea of a legitimate patrimony is farcical to cyborgs and cyperpunks. Haraway did not know how weak the walls of Utopia were. For now self-conscious cyborgs are elected to high office, and the contest for bases on which cyborgs might judge good from bad has begun. There is nothing in the cyborg that pre-programs its judgment–not families, not schools, not nations, not even the desire for survival.

 

To be at home in Mutopia is to be a cyborg. Haraway is openly ambivalent about the cyborg-persona: it is the agent of the high-tech war-machine (a nomad persona, in Deleuze-Guattari’s terms), but it is also utopian. Its utopia bypasses the wish for the idyll, for Zala, for Taidu:

 

The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection--they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party.¹⁰

 

The cyborg is thus a networker, able to pragmatically interface with whatever port is deemed desirable and practicable at the time. In the continuum of mutations, what god will guarantee that any good choices will be made? No guarantees. So let’s cut the smart and happy talk. Down with the Old Flesh! Long live the New Flesh!

 

For the past ten years we have been living in an ecstatic celebration of Mutopia, an orgy of initiation. Communications media are naturally inclined to celebrate it, since they are ostensibly its prime beneficiary. Politics, science, art all feel the tidal sway. No matter what fundamentalist jihad makes itself known, in the context of mutations it can only be a test, a thrilling agon in the headlong proliferation of moiré programs, infinitely expanding hypermedia of mutually interpenetrating operational structures. Capitalism obviously thrives, since high-tech permits the doubling and redoubling of the world in the form of electronic, “informational” commodities. Far from the commodomy of adtopia, consumers now can fuse with objects as Milton said angels do with each other.

 

Three strategies dominate: forgetting utopia, seeking constant upgrades in order to participate in the General Upgrade, and negating the negation. To forget utopia, eliminate parents, teachers, nations, children, mates, villages and mountains, romances, all desire to escape history. Eliminate retarding identity. Upgrade reality with VR; upgrade technology with AI; upgrade the body with prosthetics, vitalizing drugs, and genetic engineering; upgrade sensibilities with Simstim; upgrade choice with the materialization of the imaginary. Upgrade life with the demolition of death.

 

I am not much of a cyborg, here between the two stools of the bourgeois imaginary and the enchanted village of patriarchy. I do not think I will be able to cross over into the digital glow of the New Flesh. But I do not think I will die out. As the inventors of the future–Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin–are systematically hyperrealized, I find myself back with Kant the cyborg–who set his life to the Königsberg clock–asking the basic questions: what do we know, what should we do and what can we hope for?

 

The third strategy in the Age of Absolute Oxymoron: vanish from the hype.

 

My City Was Gone¹¹

 

The classical and medieval city was protected from the wilderness by its walls. Outside the fortifications were the wild things: panthers, bandits, demons, weather, witches at the crossroads, Dogheaded Tartars. Inside the walls human beings set up their second nature, an environment made in the human image, a secure system of shelter for production and consumption. Civilization is city life. The Mongols were accustomed to burn down the cities of those settled people who refused to accept Mongol hegemony, usually by firing flaming arrows and projectiles into the wooden edifices. Their success was drastically limited by stone fortresses.

 

City walls are important for Utopias. Since it is important for them to be articulated from wild cities like New York or William Gibson’s Sprawl, utopias–and dystopias, of course, which are collapsed utopias–require travelers to negotiate high mountain barriers like More’s Utopia, or true walls, like the Green Wall of Zamyatin’s We, or internal walls, as in The Dispossessed, walls of time in The Time Machine or bubble-domes, like Triton. The utopian wall is like the archaic city wall. Ur was said to have walls 40 meters thick, Babylon had walls 25 meters high.¹²

 

But notice how feeble the Utopian walls are, to the point that recent utopias seem to be more about the weakness of walls than their power to shelter the great experiment. Someone is always breaking through, transgressing, making an adventure of it. Some wild thing will eventually chase us through. Triton’s walls are breached repeatedly by the dystopian Earth, which is bad news on an airless moon. Shevek exists to breach the walls.

 

There is no protection against the sky. Hiroshima’s rad-hot desert is the starting point of the mutopian city. The new nomads, they are us, for we prefer the smoothest of all spaces for our war machine–the sky. The nomad’s milieu is the unarticulated sky. What shall we do? Build cities in the plain? Retreat into cyberspace, the Metaverse, and rebuild encryption-walls there? Or will we determine walls are useless, and forget utopia? The walls of Ur had nothing on the television sky.

 

Work and Net

 

An important moment in the recent development of the rational deconstruction of “humanism,” i.e., the critical rationality of the Enlightenment, came with the formulation of the difference between a work and a text.¹³ Work, of course, was characterized by labor and all its historical contingencies, with mythologies of individuality, authorial proprietorship, the authority of origins, the mystery of special knowledge in a particular place–a fictional, quasi-place: the pages and lines of a “work.” Text was the entire symbolic domain seen as if from the perspective of Martian anthropologists with a collective mind, unable to and uninterested in making petty proprietary distinctions. Might as well study the Earth by transcribing all the deeds in all the Halls of Record. Text is the weave of all symbolic aspects, the tapestry, the net. The Net.

 

When we read works of art and of humanist thought in preference to hypertextual flea-hopping on the Net we act as if we are those toga-clad utopian peasants discussing the categorical imperative while digging sewers of gold. To read a work is to think as a utopian. The utopian ideal of the Enlightenment was that each book should represent the rational-aesthetic design of the universe in the mind, and that all books together would create an even greater model. The closet utopian is the one who believes if she or he can only read enough of the best works, he or she will know the truth, and understand it.

 

The library of books is the Enlightened Empire. As a graduate student I would sometimes dream of surviving a nuclear war by living with my fellow students in the underground floors of the university’s library, raising blanket-tents in the aisles, eating from vending machines among the like-minded, and with all the time in the world to read the books in my tent.

 

When the Enlightenment had nothing more to undermine, when church dogma and bigotry, aristocratic and chauvinistic violence, bourgeois exploitation and ideology had withered before its arguments, it turned, as it always did, against the powers-that-be. But bourgeois democratic powers justify themselves through critical reason. So the Enlightenment began to undermine reason; and so, naturally, itself. That’s the breaks. Thus begins the end of legitimacy. What matters now is not the straightness and purity of connection, but how many things something can be connected to. The library of books gives way to the Net.

 

Textual islands rise up here and there, archipelagoes of quotations, aphorisms, fragments, and we sail from one to another, trying to connect the dots, to get something sweet to eat, to make love in the shade. That is what I am doing here and now: hopping from island to island, lily-pad to lily-pad, oasis to oasis, enclave to enclave. I am anachronistic, but what counts is: I am quick.

 

In Mutopia it is sometimes hard to justify atavistic “humanism”–code for intellectual conservatism. The “human being,” so clearly now part of a network of mutually intersecting forces, a moiré of rhythms, cannot justifiably hold on to the notion of an integral self, just as it must jettison fantasies of utopian earthly bliss. What then am I doing here, quoting and invoking the dead?

 

This is good advice:
watch yourself writ terribly small,
like beetles climbing in the mowed-through thatch.¹⁴

Heartland Artillery

 

My father once told me: the only good reason to leave one’s home is artillery.

 

I am sitting in my yard in Indiana. It is late morning, early summer, unusually temperate. Clear sunlight shines on maples and green-ash trees that rise up like ygdrasails, and filters through the leaves to the grass. The treetops sway against the blue. My back yard is a half-acre, enclosed by hedges of trees and dense shrubs. I have let whatever wants to grow, I just mow it at regular intervals to keep the peace. Violets have taken over a corner–I have been advised to extirpate them; I’m told they’re weeds. But they shimmer like nothing else in nature. Where the soil is exposed to the sun, the grass is long and rich, grazing material studded with wildflowers. Where the shade is heavy, there’s variety: subtle clumping mosses, crewcut grasses, wild onions, intermittent milkweeds. I have left clusters of grasses and flowers around the bases of the trees for the fairies.

 

The cats are lolling in the dappled light. Redpoll finches tear through space like happily demented bullets. My young son’s baseball glove lies in the grass, palm up. “Homeowners” are mowing their lawns. Children are playing in the park court–American kids, booming dub, loud, coarse, obscene, insecure and confident at the same time, dunking and flirting.

 

I “own” this micro-Arcadia. I am the first member of my family to have actually bought a family house; my progenitors always inherited them. I am, superficially at least, an American success. I have attained a good portion of the American Dream, the realized utopia. In this tucked away fold of the midwest, in a town of 8000, my academic salary allows me, mirabile dictu, to own this plot. The town is peaceful, white, solidly Republican. It is unlikely to be surrounded by tanks, or shelled. It is unlikely that the militia will occupy the courthouse. Our street is not on the July 4th parade route. It is one-way.

 

For the denizens of the fold it is a green black hole; the suffering of Sarajevo, Cabrini Green and Chiba City are beyond the event-horizon. For those outside, it is a fortress, an idyll, a utopia, the VR-scenario of materialized delusion. The walls of privilege and exploitation are invisible in the achieved utopia. But in mutopia, all walls are weak.

 

Aleph in Wonderland

 

Calvino holds that utopian textuality collapsed, losing its power as a normative organized alternative to reality, falling into SF.

 

The vision of a universal future has been diverted from political thought, and confined to a minor kind of literature, science fiction, though here, too, it is a negative utopia that dominates, a journey into the infernal regions of the future. Thus this way of writing, which aimed to extend its arrangement of signs even to the arrangement of things, has been taken prisoner by another literary strategy, which is more immediately effective emotionally: a story of distant wanderings and adventure that is capable of giving us rapid glimpses of tomorrow but has no power to change our way of living here in this world. Did utopia ever have this power? Certainly for Campanella it did, and maybe also for the outlandish Saint-Simonians of Enfantin. Actually to see a possible different world that is already made and in operation is to be filled with indignation against a world that is unjust and to reject the idea that it is the only possible one.¹⁵

 

Classical utopia is what Marin calls a game of space. In his Marxian-structuralist mapping of More’s book, Marin describes the way Utopia plays off a certain allegorical imaginary construction of space in the early Explorations period. Later Marin will argue with Certeau that the true modernity of utopia is in the narrative movement across spaces coded to represent an ultimate oxymoron: an infinite horizon of possibility and an abject focal point of control.¹⁶ From this perspective utopias are merely logical-mathematical fantasy machines in which infinity is contained in a point. Utopias are Alephs.

 

No one understood this better than Borges, whose work contains the black box where utopia becomes SF, and vice versa. Katherine Hayles has described his characteristic technique like this:

 

His strategy is seduction, for he progresses to [a revelation of the essential fictionality of the real] by several seemingly innocuous steps. The first step in his strategy is to transform a continuity into a succession of points, and to suggest that these points form a sequence; there follows the insinuation that the sequence progresses beyond the expected terminus to stretch into infinity; then the sequence is folded back on itself, so that closure becomes impossible because of the endless, paradoxical circling of a self-referential system. This complex strategy (which may not appear in its entirety in any given story) has the effect of dissolving the relation of the story to reality, so that the story becomes an autonomous object existing independently of any reality. The final step is to suggest that our world, like the fiction, is a self-contained entity whose connection with reality is problematic or nonexistent.¹⁷

 

Thus the sequence of history is extrapolated toward infinity: this is the dynamic “future” of SF, which then folds back onto the present, enclosing but also deforming the point of origin. Stanislaw Lem offers a complementary interpretation:

 

[Borges] never creates a new, freely invented paradigm structure. He confines himself strictly to the initial axioms supplied by the cultural history of mankind. He is a mocking heretic of culture because he never transgresses its syntax. He only extends those structural operations that are, from a logical point of view, "in order," i.e., they have never been seriously "tried out" because of extralogical reasons--but that is of course another matter altogether.¹⁸

 

Thus for Lem Borges cannot be a true writer of SF, because the structures he works his algorithmic transformational strategy on are entirely those of received “cultural-mythical sources.” The Borgesian fantastic is an always already completed library. The SF writer should know, according to Lem, that these structures “are on the decline, dying off as far as their power to interpret and explain a world undergoing further changes is concerned.” Borges cannot offer more than play “with the sacral, the awe-inspiring, the sublime and the mysterious [received] from our grandfathers.”¹⁹Lem concludes:

 

Even this great master of the logically immaculate paradox cannot "alloy" our world's fate with his own work. He has explicated to us paradises and hells that remain forever closed to man. For we are building newer, richer, and more terrible paradises and hells; but in his books Borges knows nothing of them.²⁰

 

In his cyberspace novels, William Gibson transforms Borges’s Aleph from a subversive imaginary to a diminished, simulated utopia on the threshold of Mutopia. We see in the invention of cyberspace and the cyborg an extreme development of the infinite productivity of “reality” that Baudrillard associated with the second stage of simulation, the one he associates with SF; the sampling, doubling and recombination of real bits continues apace toward the fusion of mechanical and neural reconstructions of the planes of experience. When the algorithms of simulation are part of the phenomena folks experience, when we see them in the noisy treetops or the tatoos of raccoons, then we will have phase 3 in full, reality as virtuality, in which only Buddhists and Taoists, for whom stability was always an illusion, will find their footing.

 

In Gibson, and in most cyberpunk SF, cyberspace remains an alien world. No matter how thrilling the ride of Neuromancer, Gibson’s protagonists serve alien gods. The console-cowboy Case’s famous rejection of the “meat” is a boy-thing, and it does not last. (We hear in Mona Lisa Overdrive that he has married and has four kids.²¹) The other rejectors of the meat-world in Gibson’s fiction either come back to the body, recognizing the value of mortality and limits, or they are limbic freaks who offer us no hopes (Dixie Flatline, Finn, Lise of “The Winter Market”). In Count Zero, even the remainders of Neuromancer‘s Meta-AI seek connection with the meat through a “biosoft” that leads to direct interface between humans’ organic brains and the computer-cores of the data-matrix. By the time we reach Mona Lisa Overdrive, such a biosoft offers the possibility of a concretely existing pocket universe, an Aleph, in which the whole of the matrix is reproduced microcosmically in a utopian register. But this Aleph, unlike the utopian imaginary of More and Borges, is a mortal body, powered by a battery pac on the drain.

 

In Gibson’s cyberspace trilogy we can read a full Deleuzian historical dialectic of SF and utopia, replayed in the matrix. Neuromancer’s smooth space: Case the would-be nomad. Count Zero‘s colonial space: no longer a smooth grid with cities on the plain, the matrix is chunky space, inhabited by nodes of consciousness in a web. Like cyberfarmers the cybervoodoo spirits intentionally manipulate knots of energy, and indeed appear to be beginning a process of colonizing human space, “growing” biosofts and having them “planted” in brains like Angela Mitchell’s. By a not unusual reversal, Gibson has made these diasporan spirits of former enslavement the colonial masters of the new New World.²² The empty grid is gone; in Count Zero, cyberspace is folded and inhabited. The AI empire can collapse and fade from its internal stresses, but it is no longer prey to nomads. By Mona Lisa Overdrive, cyberspace has become a sea in which pocket universes float, with mysterious neural wormholes connecting them. The Aleph that Bobby Newmark steals from 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool is an ideal world created and maintained by technological means, it is neither smooth nor chunky, but involuted and hyperreal. There can be no more nomads, hence no more utopias, since containment is total. So total there is nothing outside the Alephs. But what if the Alephs began to move, what would space be then? At the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive, the protagonists of the three novels (Finn from Neuromancer, Bobby and Angie from Count Zero, the Aleph itself from Mona Lisa Overdrive) inhabiting the Aleph climb into a limo to make an obscure rendez-vous with a like-being, another Aleph perhaps, in the constellation Alpha-Centauri.

 

Tai-Chi Chuan

 

It is said that the Chinese martial and meditational art, Tai-Chi Chuan, was founded by the monk Chang San-Feng, who lived during the late Yüan Dynasties and the early Ming. By applying the Taoist principles of yin and yang, Chang created an art that used softness, resiliency and balance to defeat aggression. In one legend,

 

[t]he Mongolian royal family of the Yüan Dynasty were hunting in the Wu-Tang Mountain as Chang was picking herbs to be used as medicine. He was quite aware of the Mongolians being good archers, but he did not like their pompous attitude. While he stood there watching, the Mongols ordered him to walk away. This made Chang angry, but he spoke to the prince with a smile saying, "Your highness hunts with bow and arrow; I use my bare hands." Suddenly a pair of hawks flew across the woods, and Chang jumped some several feet high and caught them. He dropped to the ground like a falling leaf, without making any noise. The prince was shocked. Chang placed the birds on each of his palms. No matter how hard the birds tried to fly, they could not lift themselves. Chang then said, "I have mercy on living creatures; I do not want to hurt the birds." As soon as he withdrew his palms, the hawks flew into the sky. One of the prince's followers was angry and drew his bow to shoot an arrow at Chang. The master opened his mouth and caught the arrow with his teeth; then holding the arrow with his index and middle fingers, he threw it towards a tree. "I have no need of any violent weapons," said he. The arrow struck and was buried deep in the tree.²³

Autopia

 

The US is utopia achieved. We should not judge their crisis as we would judge our own, the crisis of the old European countries. Ours is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the impossibility of their realization. Theirs is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence. The Americans are not wrong in their idyllic conviction that they are at the center of their worlds, the supreme power, the absolute model for everyone. And this conviction is not so much founded on natural resources, technologies, and arms, as on the miraculous premise of a utopia made reality, of a society which, with a directness we might judge unbearable, is built on the idea that it is the realization of everything the others have dreamt of--justice, plenty, rule of law, wealth, freedom. It knows this, it believes in it, and in the end, the others have come to believe in it too. In the present crisis of values, everyone ends up turning towards the culture which dared to forge ahead and, by a theatrical masterstroke, turn those values into reality, towards that society which, thanks to the geographical and mental break effected by emigration, allowed itself to believe it could create an ideal world from nothing.²⁴

Losing and Losing

 

In my late twenties I lived in New York City. To cope with my suburban anxiety in the big bad city, I studied Tai Chi Chuan with a student of the great Professor Cheng Man-ch’ing. My adulthood began on those days, when I first heard the Taoist notion that my teacher sometimes called “investing in loss” and sometimes “learning by losing and losing.” Lao Tze says: “Yield and overcome.” The rule for thriving in Mutopia: losing and losing.

 

Nostalgia for the Imaginary

 

There is no real and no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, even the one separating the real from the imaginary, begins to disappear and to be absorbed by the model alone?It is at its maximum in utopias, where a transcendent world, a radically different universe, is portrayed (in all cases, the separation from the real world is maximal; it is the utopian island in contrast to the continent of the real). It is diminished considerably in SF: SF only being, most often, an extravagant projection of, but qualitatively different from, the real world of production. Extrapolations of mechanics or energy, velocities or powers approaching infinity–SF’s fundamental patterns and scenarios are those of mechanics, of metallurgy, and so forth. Projective hypostasis of the robot. (In the limited universe of the pre-Industrial era, utopias counterposed an ideal alternative world. In the potentially limitless universe of the production era, SF adds by multiplying the world’s own possibilities.)

 

It is totally reduced in the era of implosive models. Models no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism.²⁵

 

Utopia is followed by SF, the realistic projection of real conditions; then SF is followed by…what? The realistic production of utopian conditions? But if the utopian imaginary is infinitely removed from reality, what is a realistic utopian imaginary? Surely it is Virtual Reality. For VR is the domain in which the model creates the experience of reality without necessarily referring to, or using, stimuli from the raw real. Utopia has been replaced by the habitable paraspace of quasi-utopian VR.

 

Like the European Jews of the New Left, and like Calvino, (and myself), Baudrillard is nostalgic for the imaginary. Even this nose-thumber at European culture is shocked by the US, for the transgressions and atrocities Baudrillard allowed himself to imagine in the magic theater of his theoretical works appear all around him there, insistently solid and real. Either one abdicates theory by accepting the hegemony of Realization, or one resists by holding onto the virtue of irony and withdraws to the Carcassonne of the imagination and waits for the sic transit.

 

We shall remain nostalgic utopians, agonizing over our ideals, but balking, ultimately, at their realization, professing that everything is possible, but never that everything has been achieved. Yet that is what America asserts. Our problem is that our old goals--revolution, progress, freedom--will have evaporated before they were achieved, before they became reality. Everything that has been heroically played out and destroyed in Europe in the name of Revolution and Terror has been realized in its simplest, most empirical form on the other side of the Atlantic (the utopia of wealth, rights, freedom, the social contract, and representation). Similarly, everything we have dreamed in the radical name of anti-culture, the subversion of meaning, the destruction of reason and the end of representation, that whole anti-utopia which unleashed so many theoretical and political, aesthetic and social convulsions in Europe, without ever actually becoming a reality (May '68 is one of the last examples) has all been achieved here in the simplest, most radical way. Utopia has been achieved here and anti-utopia is being achieved: the anti-utopia of unreason, of deterritorialization, of the indeterminacy of language and the subject, the neutralization of all values, of the death of culture. America is turning all this into reality, and it is going about it in an uncontrolled, empirical way. All we do is dream and, occasionally, try and act out our dreams. America, by contrast, draws the logical, pragmatic consequences from everything that can possibly be thought. It does not ironize upon the future or destiny: it gets on with turning things into material realities.²⁶

 

Once the real has been exhausted, you have to move on, and colonize the imagination. Just do it! Do it yourself! Autopia or Bust!

 

Goodbye, Labor Theory

 

I must be clear that I’m not speaking of Blois or the Hofburg, nor of Castle Dracula. The building itself is not a thousand years old, of course. Zichy renovated it in 1880 into its present form. “The castle” is in fact a small manor house built in consonance with the dominant style of peasant architecture. A single raised-story, whitewashed, roofed with red clay shingles, in the shape of an L. Inside are about ten large rooms. Indoor plumbing was introduced only about ten years ago, although power lines were brought in in the ’30s. The property attached to this modest edifice consists now only of two small parks, to the east and the west.

 

I first saw this ancient place when I was nineteen, on my first visit to the country. For the most part, I perceived it as I have described it, as a child of emigrants might visit his father’s village in the old country, the old people, and sniff some of the ancient air. A very nice place. I have always felt some resistance to my father’s grand plan of returning to his homeland and picking up where he left off. I grew up in the States, came of age in the Sixties, became comfortable with the atmosphere of social movements, Black culture, rejection of class privilege. I used to see Zala from this perspective, allergic to any hereditary patriarchal role. In essence, I viewed my father’s project as quixotic, even if it were attainable in reality. The Restoration.

 

It is irritating, at the end of the century of democracy and socialism, to have to imagine the archaic subject-position of the landed gentry as a positive thing. When I thought as a utopian, I knew this land and house should go “back to the people,” the ones who built and worked it. But at the end of the century of totalitarian democracy and socialism, the labor-theory of value no longer seems like the voice of God. The villagers themselves say they would like the old owner to return–suitably diminished. They too believe the place has its historical power, and in some situations class matters less than conservation. Those should own the land who care for it. And they don’t mind that someone else is saddled with the burden.

 

My father writes that I have been named heir of this estate.

 

In the night

 

It is 3:30 a.m. The houses on my street have been dark since midnight, every one but ours. In the backyard, my wife is following a family of raccoons back to their tree from the porch where she had dinner ready for them, as she does every night. A ray of light from a flashlight bobs up and down in the darkness. Hoosiers despise coons, and delight in hunting them. But there are no coons in Europe, and my Hungarian wife is now a visitor to another planet, making contact with aliens.

 

It is a mellow night. Fireflies, which are also unknown in Europe, have floated up to the treetops. It is wonderfully still. Etti (whose name is the female form of Attila) insists that the wild fauna recognize her as a friend. I, independent male, prefer to watch the beasts do their thing without interfering. I think I am an observer, but I am actually reveling. For Etti reveling would never be enough. She is intent on creating a peaceable kingdom in her yard, where the cat will lie down with the squirrel, and the possum with the raccoon.

 

The raccoons sought us out. One night, the coon mother trundled in the back door and liberated a bag of dry catfood for her brood. Now they stay to be petted, they display distinct personalities, and they have lost their skittishness.

 

This mild night on the edge of the woods is not much in political terms. It is not a new thing. I am sure many women, and even a few men, try to form peaceable kingdoms in the liminal zone between the wild and the house. We have come to know the raccoons’ tree-hollow and the nest of the stag beetles; sometimes we catch the new beetles, glowing like gems, emerging from the ground and radiating outward from the center.

 

Until quite recently, Etti did not know precisely where she was born and to this day she has not seen the place. She knew the name of the town, but for a number of historically complex reasons she was not sure exactly where to look for it. She was born on the retreat, as her father’s Hungarian troops and their families were fleeing the advancing Russian artillery. Delivered while her father held the terrified Austrian obstetrician at gunpoint, she stayed no more than a couple of hours in that particular Krummau or Krumlov; in the wink of an eye she was traveling west on a military wagon, her parents driving themselves to meet up with, and surrender to, the American army.

 

Etti’s birth town was in Bohemia, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Nazi-occupied Austria, then again Czechoslovakia, and now Czechia. It did not move. Europe moved.

 

Her migrations have brought her here, for the moment, to this night. Her child is sleeping upstairs in a cozy American house. Her flashlight beams up into the branches. The coon mother calls down.

 

A utopia of fine dust

 

Certainly, in recent times, my need to come up with some tangible representation of future society has declined. This is not because of some vitalistic assertion of the unforeseeable, or because I am resigned to the worst, or because I have realized that philosophical abstraction is a better indication of what may be hoped for, but maybe simply because the best that I can still look for is something else, which must be sought in the folds, in the shadowy places, in the countless involuntary effects that the most calculated system creates without being aware that perhaps the truth lies right there. The utopia I am looking for today is less solid than gaseous: it is a utopia of fine dust, corpuscular, and in suspension.²⁷

 

Mu.

 

Notes

 

1. Bruce Sterling, “The Compassionate, the Digital,” Globalhead (New York: Bantam, 1994) 65.

 

2. Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation under Shakra and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965) 50.

 

3. G.I. Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969) 151-52.

 

4. “…commodomy” used by Richard Simon, “Advertising as Literature: The Utopian Fiction of the American Marketplace,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 22.2 (1980): 155-74.

 

5. Ernst Bloch: from The Principle Hope, quoted in Tom Moylan, “The Locus of Hope: Utopia versus Ideology,” Science-Fiction Studies 27 (1982): 159.

 

6. Louis Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Winter 1993): 403-04; 410-11.

 

7. Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateuas: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 15.

 

8. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Abaris Books, 1982) 109.

 

9. Horst De La Croix, Military Considerations in City Planning: Fortifications (New York: George Braziller, 1972) 16.

 

10. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991): 151.

 

11. Chrissie Hynde, “My City Was Gone,” Learning to Crawl, Sire Records, 1983.

 

12. De La Croix, 15.

 

13. See Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” The Rustle of Language, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986): 49-55.

 

14. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, “The Cool Blades.”

 

15. Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, Trans. Patrick Creagh (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987) 247-48.

 

16. Louis Marin, Utopiques. Jeux d’Espaces (Paris: Les Editions Minuit, 1973).

 

17. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the 20th Century (Ithaca: Cornell, 1984) 143.

 

18. Stanislaw Lem, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) 237.

 

19. Lem, 241-42.

 

20. Lem, 241-42.

 

21. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Vintage, 1988) 137.

 

22. See Kathleen Biddick, “Humanist History and the Haunting of Virtual Worlds: Problems of Memory and Rememoration,” Genders 18 (Winter 1993): 47-66.

 

23. Tsung Hwa, Jou The Tao of Tai Chi Chuan (New York: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1980) 8.

 

24. Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso, 1989) 54-55.

 

25. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” Science-Fiction Studies 55 (1991): 309-10.

 

26. Jean Baudrillard, America 77.

 

27. Calvino, 254-55.