English 67

[I'm using this orthographic monstrosity "u/dystopia" as a lexeme that denotes the inseparability of utopias and dystopias]

It’s taken me an inordinately long time to formulate some thoughts on u/dystopia, freedom and collectivity, and post-modernity in Huxley. Why, I am not sure. Not because they are anything particularly profound, that much is certain.

The idea of Utopia does not originate with Thomas More. It is as old as the Edenic myth, or as the idea of the “Golden Age” in Greek mythology. Both myths speak to the idea that the present age or world is somehow a debased shadow of perfection that once existed. This myth is invoked every time you hear someone complain how this place, or this band, or whatever used to be “cool” before it got ruined by (whatever intervening event or group).

So Utopia and dystopia moves in two directions: falling from, and movement towards.

As Huxley amply demonstrates, utopian and dystopian imaginations are inseparable. In fact, all imagined utopias from Eden to the Greek Golden age contain the seeds of their own destruction, which seems to indicate that there can be no imagined perfect world without an inevitable destruction, downfall or loss. In Freudian terms, perhaps utopias are the pleasure principle (eros), and dystopias are its obverse, thanatos, or the intervening reality principle.

One thing that utopias all seem to share is the possibility of non-alienated labor. In Eden, there was no labor necessary. In More’s Utopia, all denizens must labor for food, but there is no excess production, no excess consumption, and all must spend at least two years learning and teaching farming. No one works for someone else, nor for the self alone, but for the common good. Gold and silver are the chains for slaves; jewels are toys for children. In other words, Utopian labor is pre-capitalist, or post-capitalist non-alienated labor. Huxley offers a future of the worst of capitalism (alienation, mechanization, inequality) and the worst of Soviet-style authoritarianism. Yet both modernist capitalism and Soviet era communism feature an unthinking devotion to production and consumption.

There are slaves in Utopia: they are either criminals of Utopia, the captives of war, or voluntary bondsmen from other countries who prefer slavery in Utopia to “freedom” in their home country. This I think at least demonstrates the historical horizon that More worked under: he could not imagine a society without some form of indentured or bonded servitude, because none had existed in his historical imagination. Which begs another question: can we only imagine recombined elements of our own experience? Read LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven for one take on that.

More offered numerous critiques of European hereditary monarchy and nascent capitalism like the following:

Is a commonwealth not unjust and ungrateful if it lavishes so many benefits on noblemen, as they are called, and goldsmiths, and the rest who are idle or else merely flatterers and providers of empty pleasures, but makes no proper provision for farmers [and other laborers] without whom there would be no commonwealth at all? . . . (ed. Miller 131).

Statements like these cause readers and critics of More to hedge about whether More is in fact being “serious” or satirical. The critiques often take the form of supposedly “realistic” assessments of economy that see post-modern consumer capitalism as, if not the best of all possible worlds, the best we are going to do – so get used to it. More’s Utopia, with its relatively faceless, personality-less, non-materialist denizens seems to be the opposite of the consumer-capitalist society. In fact, it seems a direct rebuke of the renaissance trends (entrepreneurialism, individualism) that have analogues on post-modern society. Therefore, he must have been pulling our leg, right? Right?!

Consumer capitalism, as outlined by Jameson and others, mitigates utopian imaginaries by 1) equating consumption with happiness and fulfillment and 2) simultaneously dramatizing the impossibility of happiness as material fulfillment. If desire is a force of its own, infinitely renewable, unquenchable by material gain or progress, then happiness as stasis or stability is an impossibility. Therefore, stop trying and learn to accept imperfection and “human nature.” I add scare quotes to the second of these terms because I find it desperately under-theorized. (Indeed, I would argue, but not to the death, that there are only three elements to human nature – eating, shitting, and reproduction. Everything else we do, and our rituals surrounding these three things, are cultural, even if they feel “natural.” They seem natural because their cultural roots are lost to history).

The origin of dystopia

John Stuart Mill was one of the first recorded to use the word “dystopia” in 1868: in a derogatory sense in Parliamentary debate. Mill’s theories in “On Liberty” are frequently cited as a founding text of classical “liberalism” which holds that individual freedom to do what one likes as long as one does no harm. Mill is frequently cited with approval by contemporary conservatives who want all of society’s goods, services and functions to be ruled by markets, private property, and private enterprise. Mill’s theory looks askance at any form of collectivism, and most collectivist theories of governance seem to be Utopian – organizational, concerned with equity and rational distribution of resources. Mill, however, was an eloquent proponent for women’s rights in the nineteenth century – arguing for such utopian notions as equality among the sexes (which is not a quality notable in More’s Utopia).

Sir Thomas More’s Utopians (written in 1516), for example, held very little private property (although More’s Utopians did own slaves), were organized into small collectivist units, generally pacifist (in contrast to a Libertarian like Mill, who advocated that war was far from the worse thing that could happen), but also has as few laws as possible. So More’s collectivist vision, in that it minimizes the influence of religion, also resonates somewhat with the libertarian vision of someone like Mill.

All utopian or dystopian texts are sites of political debate of one kind or another. In BNW, it seems to be a debate over an undertheorized “freedom” (as mentioned by Berdayev). What makes “freedom” a transcendental category, that cannot be questioned or deposed as being the highest good? It begs the question: is freedom an infinite commodity? That is, can we imagine a world where each individual has maximal freedom, and that freedom does not impinge on the potential and rights of others? When does one person (or nation’s) freedom become someone else’s “unfreedom?”

Freedom of the individual and collective happiness seem to be locked into a kind of dialectical struggling embrace in the science/speculative fiction tradition. However, it’s hard to separate any either utopian or dystopian vision from a specific historical moment of its creation, whether we’re talking about Thomas More, who imagined an old “new world” inhabited by people who had managed to effectively disentangle religion from politics (a problem which would cause More’s eventual execution), to Huxley who is reacting to the new social and essentially a-political possibilities offered by modernity in the 1930s.

Huxley has the worst of capitalism (Fordism) and Soviet-style communism. Just as Utopias of whatever description are usually historically specific answers to a “concrete historical dilemma” (Jameson, Archaeologies 145). And so, if we are looking to these texts to speak to our own specific historical moment, the results may be mixed at best.

One of the questions Jameson asks in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions is are all Utopian imaginings to be rejected, because all are supposedly “doomed to fail”? Are they inherently unrealistic? Or does that critique of utopia (of whatever character) merely reinforce the status quo, and the dominant regime of whatever description? Are dystopian/anti-utopian fictions inherently conservative or reactionary?

Or: the warnings of dystopics notwithstanding, can we reclaim the utopian impulse as a way of imagining alternatives – not perfections – but better alternatives to the world as we find it now, and the historical means and methods for achieving these better alternatives?