levitas, ruth_being in utopia.pdf
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T ilE l! EDGEHOC RF.VIF\V i SPR I NG 2008
broader category of political thought.l2 TI1is is to define utopia in terms of form and con-fine it tO a primarily Western tradition- and exclude those descriptions of the good life
and the good society that permeate all cultures, mythologies, and religious traditions.
Alternatively, utopia may be defined in terms of content, such as equality, or har-
mony, but this is problematic since, as is so often remarked, one person's utopia is another's hell. Within the formal literary genre there are white supremacist utopias such
as The Turner Diaries, very different socialist utopias such
But ifnot universal, this
humtln yearning and longing
as Looking Backward and News from Nowhere, and femi-
nist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.
Utopia may also be defined in terms of location, in the
future rather than the past. Some writers have also sought
to define utopia in terms of function. For Karl Mannheim,
a utopia is defined by its transformative function: "only
those orientations transcending reality will be referred to
by us as utopian which, when they pass over into con-
and reaching to, a better
life is certainly common and
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immensely V?lriable .. .
duct, tend tO shatter, either partially or wholly, the order
of things prevailing at the time." 13 This position is directly opposed ro that of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose objections to the political movements of Owenism,
Fourierism, and Saint-Simonianism were precisely that they inhibited political change
by distracting the working classes from the real necessity of class struggle.
It is plain, however, that utopias and utopianism may differ in form, content, loca-tion, and function, so that while all these are important aspects of utopianism, they will
not serve for the purpose of definition. Indeed, it is probably better not to attempt ro classify cultural expressions as utopias/n or not utopias/n at all, but to recognize that
there are utopian elements to many cultural forms . That leaves the question of what
that element is. And, broadly speaking, it is the expression of longing for the restoration
of lack, for that which is missing, the expression of the desire for a better way of being
and a better way of living, which is by no means confined to literary descriptions of
ideal societies or political programs. Whether the source of this lies in human nature
itself and an innate propensity to venture beyond, as is argued by Ernst Bloch in his
magisterial The Principle of Hope, is debatable. But if not universal, this human yearn-
ing and longing for, and reaching tO, a better life is certainly common and immensely
variable in both form and content, both where literally described and where existen-
tially implied. l4 Schubert song "An die Musik" is but one example of the latter
mode, with its praise of music for its capacity to transport the self into a better world: that art that "hast mich in eine bess're Welt entruckt."
Verbal descriptions of better worlds are more easily misread in terms of their inten-
tions than Schubert's song. The mistake with the latter might be to understand it only
12 See Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) . l3 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1979) 176. 14 For a fi.dl exposition of this argument, see Ruth Leviras, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip Allan,
1990).
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BE I NG I N UTO PI A I LEV TT;\S
Ruth Levitas.
as metaphor. The error with literary utopias is ro take them too literally and to interpret
them as goals. There may indeed be instances where authors of utopian fictions believe
the society they are describing to be perfect, and/or intend it as a political program.
However) most authors from at least the late nineteenth century do not suffer from this
level of hubris. Reflexivity and the understanding of historical contingency are a product not of postmodernity but of modernity itself. Thus Marx's reluctance ro delineate the
institutional forms of communist society-to "writing recipes ... for the cook-shops of
the fucure" 15-stemmed from the recognition of this contingency both in terms of social
formations and human capacities, needs, and desires. Morris, who in later life was an
active figure in explicitly lv1arxist political organizations, felt the need to say rather more
than simply "food is good at the hope workers cafe" and did set our a uropian vision in
News from Nowhere, published originally in serial form in Commonweal in 1890. News ftom Nowhere was written as a counterpoint to Looking Backward because it
was "essential that the ideal of the new society should be kept before the eyes of the
l5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: Random House, 1936) 21.
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mass of the working-classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be broken, or lest they should be misdirected."l6 Yet Morris also argued that "it is impos-
sible to build a scheme h)r the society of the future, for no man can really think himself out of his own days."l7 He thought utopias dangerous precisely because they could
only be an expression of the temperament of authors and their times, but risked being
interpreted as goals. And just as News from Nowhere's subtitle is "an epoch of rest," sug-
gesting (as the text does) other epochs to follow, Wells opens A Jll!odern Utopia with the claim that such a work must eschew static perfection and embed change:
The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs difFer in one fundamental
aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin
quickened the thought of the world. Those were ali perfect and static
States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest
and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple
generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue
and happiness, to be foliowed by other virtuous, happy and entirely
similar generations until the Gods grew weary. Change and develop-
ment were dammed back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern
Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent
state bur as a hopeful stage leading ro a long ascent of stages. 18
By the late twentieth century, this consciousness of contingency and change had given
rise to utopian writing that typically embedded pluralism, reflexivity, and internal con-
testation-described by Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible as "critical utopianism," and exemplified by such writers as Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin.I9
Utopia is perhaps better undersrood as a method than as a goal. At its core it has the
desire for being otherwise, both individually and subjectively and (sometimes) socially
and objectively. But its expressions are a method of exploring and bringing to debate
the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. Wells, indeed, argued not
only that utopia was a method, but that it is the essential method of sociology: "the cre-
ation of utopias-and their exhaustive criticism- is the proper and distinctive method
of sociology."20 Rather than refer to a "utopian method," which immediately mobilizes
large amounts of the cultural baggage and misunderstanding surrounding the term '\no-
pia," I now refer to this as the IROS method, IROS being the Imaginary Reconstitution
of Society. This is not the invention of a method, but the naming of what is entailed in
utopian speculation, utopian scholarship, and transformative politics.
IROS has three aspects. The first two of these are an analytical, archaeological mode and a constructive, architectuml one; the third is, for want of a better term, ontologi-
16 \Villiam Morris and . Belforr Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (London: Swann Sonnenschein. 1893) 278.
17 Morris and Bax 17. 18 Wells J J. 19 See Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (London: Merhuen, 1986). 20 H. G. Wells , "'The So-Called Science of Sociology," An Englishman Looks at the Wotfd (London: Cassell,
1914)204.
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BE I ;:-..!C 1;:-..1 UTO PI A I I.F.V I TAS
cal, or concerned with the nature of being. The architectural mode is precisely what characterizes the literary form of utopia and gives it its sociological character in Wells's
work: it involves the institutional design and delineation of the good society-and, in the case of intentional communities, its partial concrete instantiation. The archaeologi-
cal mode complements this, for it involves the interpellation of absent or implicit ele-
ments in political, literary, or artistic utopian ''accounts." Its similarity with archaeology
[Utopia's] expressions are
a method of exploring and
bringing to debate the
lies in the excavation of fragments and shards and their
recombination into a coherent whole. The point of such
archaeology is to lay the underpinning model of the good society open to scrutiny and to public critique. And the
ontological mode is concerned precisely with the selves
that inhabit utopia, or that utopia needs to allow-the
inhabitants of the "brave new world/That has such people potential contents and contexts
in't."2 1 These modes or facets of the utopian method are of human flourishing. analyrjcally separable from one another but are also inter-
twined: they do not, for example, break down into literature and communitarianism as
architecture, political discourse analysis as archaeology and psychology, and philosophy and theology as ontology. Rather, the distinctive characteristic of the imaginary recon-
stitution of society is its holism-just as for Wells, this was the distinctive characteristic
of sociology. Wherever we start in the process of imagining ourselves and our world
otherwise, all three modes must eventually come into play.22
Archaeology and architecture are most evidently concerned with the concrete insti-
tutional character of an alternative society. And here the stricture that utopias should
not be taken literally needs to be qualified. For if the purpose of a utopian method is
to bring to debate the potential structure of an alternative society, in a public version
of Wells's exhaustive criticism, then literal criticism is indeed appropriate. The consid-
eration of alternative modes of social organization has never been more necessary. The
global problems that we face include not just poverty, inequity, and violence, but the
potential destruction of the basis of all our livelihoods, the capacity of the planet to
sustain human life at all. The environmental constraints of climate change and resource
depletion mean that how we live will have to change, and it is better that alternatives
be considered and debated rather than emerge in ways that simply protect the interests
of the most powerful.
The objective critique of institutional proposals needs, however, to be tempered
by the understanding that utopian speculation, whatever its form, operates also on
another level-and one that is equally necessary to transformative politics. Taken liter-
21 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1. 22 In the fim published accounc of the IROS method writ ten in 2002, I identified only the first cwo of these
modes: see "The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Society a.
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ally, even if one does not agree with Roger Scruton that News from Nowhere is a piece of pie-eyed sentimentality, it would be hard not co endorse Raymond \Villiams's com-
ment that any future socialist society will be more complex rather than simpler than our own. For Miguel Abensour, glossed by Edward Thompson, the point of utopia is
its disruptive function and the opening up of a space in which we can experience the
possibility of being otherwise-of having different wants, needs, and satisfaction: "And
in such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values ... are thrown into disarray.
And we enter into Utopia's proper and new-found space: the education of desire."23
In this process, we come to desire in a different way- or rather, where the literary text
is concerned, it provides a space in which we are able at least to imagine ourselves
desiring differently. Herbert Marcuse addresses the utopian project in its political and
psychological rather than literary form, in terms of the transformation of needs, wants,
and desires: his new reality principle demands the end of introjected compulsions
to consumption and domination. Such claims are directly concerned with the third
aspect of the utopian mode, the transformation of self and the imagination of ourselves
otherwise.
1his is always a utopian project in the sense of envisioning a better way of being and
a subjective transformation, although it is not always utopian in the sense of implying
objective social transformation. And where both are present, the connection may be
differently construed. In the kind of ideal society that CoUn Davis describes as a per-
fect moral commonwealth, social harmony flows from individual perfection and mora1
restraint. Conversely, for Robert Owen, character is a product of circumstance: social
. .. the point of utopirl is its
disruptive function and the
harmony and right education produce happy and coop-
opening up of a space in which
erative people. Imagining ourselves otherwise is both
common and complex; pace Carey, real people do it
all the time. Anthony G iddens coined the term "nar-
ratives of self" to refer to the process of reflecting on
who we are, might have been, and might be. He linked
this tO the condit ion of late modernity, in which, "the
self becomes a ' reflexive project,' sustained through a
revisable narrative of self identity"- the beginnings of
tPe can experience the possibility
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ojbei11g otherwise . ..
which are apparent in Morris and Wells. 24
The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, how we have come w be .so, and what our options are for the future are not necessarily liberatory. Indeed, they may
bring to mind Bloch's comment that the wishes of che weak are often only those that
the powerful wish them to be. Thus there is the overwhelming cultural pressure to
monitor and control our bodies through diet and exercise, which involves imagining
the perfectly honed and healthy- and especially not obese-self; health and longevi ty
are an individual responsibility, and physical imperfection, illness, and death itself a
23 In Edward 'lhompson, William Monis: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin, 1976) 790- l. 24 Anrhony G iddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self rmd Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 199 I) back cover.
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r I I I II r [) C E H 0 C fU: \ a \V I \I' R I N t; 2 0 0 R
they themselves belong."25 Just such a process is set out in the work of Roberto Unger.
What Unger sees out in the key texts Dem()cracy Realized and The SeljAwakened is a par-ticular form of the utopian method rooted in social practice, and entailing both insti-
tutional and existential transformation. Democracy Realized, subtitled The Progressive
Alternative, is a summary statement of Unger's hopes for a gradual move from the
global neo-liberal status quo to a world that is more democratic and more economi-
cally just, through a process he describes as democratic
Utopifl is shtlped by the double experimentalism. Here Unger's arguments are pitched in
terms of the institutional structures of society and a pro-
cess of change of those economic, social, and political structures and processes through step-by-step improvisa-
tion and collective learning. Hope and imagination are
central tO chis. Imagination is needed in the short term
(for institutional improvisation) and in the long term,
pressure of what it is possible to
imagine and what it is possible
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to imagine tlS possible.
to provide a sense of direction and "a larger vision of society and history that can help
inform and inspire its work."26 Unger argues that chis active process of improvisation
creates possibility, both objectively and in the capacities of human beings to change
themselves and their circumstances. Democratic experimentalism is perhaps the "archi-
tectural" mode of IROS-alchough Unger would find this coo rigid a metaphor: "pro-
grammatic thought is sequence, not bJueprinr, music, not architecture," echoing both
Bloch's claim that music is the most quintessentially utopian form and David Harvey's
contrast between spatial and processualutopianism.27
Unger describes his approach as radical pragmatism, sharply distinguished from
the pragmatism of, for example, Richard Rorty, which regards the perfection of the
institutions of Am erican democracy as the goal of the good society. Unger's critique
applies to resistance to institutional change more widely-and to the consequences
of this for identity: "The source of the denial of the alterability of social life is a spe-
cies of institutional fetishism," and "institutional dogmatism ... amounts to a species of
idolatry. It nails our interests, ideals, and collective self-understandings to the cross of
contingent, time-bound institutions."2l:! Part of the role of imagining alternatives is to
resist th e forces working in favor of conformity by contradicting the taken-for-granted
character of the real. And if what we understand as human nature is simply what we are
like now, shaped by present circumstances, we are, in Unger's view, always more chan
this- always more than Carey's "real people." "We never completely surrender," writes
Unger.29 His description of living for the future as "a way of living in the present as a
being not wholly determined by the present conditions of its existence" is akin to the
25 Ernst Bloch , The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 3. 26 Robeno Mangabeira Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 1998) 15. 27 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007) 117. See David Harvey, Spttces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
28 Unger, The Seij'Awakened, 49, 23. 29 Unger, The Self Awakened, 40-1.
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BF.ING li\ UTOPIA I l.EVITAS
Christian claim to be citizens of one kingdom while dwelling in another.3 But Unger,
like Bloch, re-ascribes grace to the human subject, and the Kingdom of God to a pos-
sible human future. The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of
the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity.
It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its
own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and
the prospect of death, of its tenor before the indifference and vastness
of nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the
whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recog-
nition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a
world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to
do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and
every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and
paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps. 31
For Unger, this is necessarily a gradual process. He looks to "the intimation of a
different world, in which we would become (slightly) different people, with (slightly)
revised understandings of our interests and ideals."32 The idea that the imagination of
ourselves as somewhat different is commonplace, something that real people do, and
that can be encouraged through social and political engagement, runs directly counter
to the view that "human nature" makes radical transformation and utopian hope "unre-
alistic." Utopia is shaped by the double pressure of what it is possible co imagine and
what it is possible to imagine as possible. Consequently, Fredric Jameson has suggested
that an imagined world whose inhabitants would be radically other is one in which we
would not be ourselves, and this evokes the terror of annihilation. For utopia not tO
risk rejection as contrary to human nature, Unger's gradual opening of institutional and
human change may be critical.
One reason why it is important to "keep society open to alternative futures and
inspire in politics and culture a contest of visions" is that this in itself allows people
to understand their own potential to change. 33 It enables the emergence of "prophetic
identity," that is, self-understanding in terms of who we might become (both individu-
ally and collectively) rather than who we now are, and in particular where we come
from. Philip Pullman makes a similar point about the dangers of fixing a sense of self
in terms of religious "identity," which is only one aspect of our origins and complex,
30 Unger, The Self Awakened, 40. 31 Unger, The Self.Awakened, 26- 7 . 32 Unger, Democraq ReaLized, 12. 33 Unger, Democracy ReaLized, 168.
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shifting being in the world. 34 In particular, we should also educate our children to be prophets, through the development of their capacities, which- like all education-
entails hope, transformation, and a move beyond what now is and what we now are. "lbe point, says Unger, is simply this: to "raise up our humaniry."35 We have the poten-
tial to become real people who can live in utopia; potentially, we already are those
people. ~The utopian project is not imperiled by our incapacity to change and become
otherwise, but impelled by our capacity, need, and desire to do so.
34 Philip Pullman, "Against Identity," Free Expression Is No Offince, cd. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Penguin, 2005) 105- 15.
35 Unger, The Self Awakened, 2.