es3209w1

ES3207: Dreamworld Children

Week 1: Utopianism, the Utopian Impulse, and Elements of Utopian Thinking.

return to module outline,

last updated 17.09.09.

Introduction

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was written much later than Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the book that largely initiated the genre of utopian writing in the West. However, Robinson Crusoe provides a highly pertinent illustration of how a combination of Christianity, technology, and social order could lead to progress. On Crusoe's island, the institution of the Protestant virtues of Godliness, hard work, and a well-ordered domestic economy, resulted in him effectively creating a microcosm of an idealised North European society - including its relationship to the 'other' of colonisation.

So, here we have an initial image of a utopia created out of loss and absence, and a first speculative example of the ideal that is to fill the experiential void thus created. The general approach taken in this module will be to examine related ways in which our thinking about culture, the ways we live our lives, the ways we interact with one another (and the many objects and entities that we populate these lived worlds with), have been represented in media-texts which have sustained, modified, and even constrained social thinking and policy-making. The historical scope of the study is therefore very large, as is the variety of cultural contexts within which this kind of thinking has taken place.

Here's another introduction - this time employing an image from the Bible that is here retold by Franz Kafka, published by Penguin in a collection entitled The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works.

The City Coat of Arms

At first everything was tolerably well organised for the building of the Tower of Babel; indeed the organisation was perhaps excessive, too much thought was given to guides, interpreters, accommodation for the workmen and roads of communication, just as if centuries of undisturbed opportunity for work lay ahead. It was even the general opinion at the time that one simply could not build too slowly; this opinion only needed to be over-emphasised a little and people would have shrunk from laying the foundations at all. The argument ran as follows: the essence of the whole enterprise is the idea of building a tower that will reach to heaven. Beside that idea everything else is secondary. The idea, once grasped in its full magnitude, can never vanish again; so long as there are men on earth there will also be the strong desire to finish building the tower. But in this respect there need be no anxiety for the future; on the contrary, human knowledge is increasing, architecture has made progress and will make further progress, in another hundred years a piece of work that takes us a year will perhaps be done in half a year, and what is more done better, more securely. So why be in such a hurry to toil away now to the limit of one's powers? There would only be sense in that if one could hope to erect the tower in the span of one generation. But that was quite out of the question. It seemed more likely that the next generation, with their improved knowledge, would find the work of the previous generation unsatisfactory, and pull down what had been built in order to start afresh. Such thoughts caused energy to flag, and people concerned themselves less with the tower than with constructing a city for the workmen. Each nationality wanted to have the best quarter; this gave rise to disputes, which developed into bloody conflicts. These conflicts continued endlessly; to the leaders they were a new proof that, since the necessary concentration for the task was lacking, the tower should be built very slowly, or preferably postponed until a general peace had been concluded. However the time was not spent only in fighting; in the intervals embellishments were made to the city, which admittedly provoked fresh envy and fresh conflicts. Thus the period of the first generation passed, but none of the succeeding ones was any different; except that technical skill was increasing all the while, and belligerence with it. To this must be added that by the time of the second or third generation the senselessness of building a tower up to heaven was already recognised, but by that time everybody was far too closely bound up with one another to leave the city.

All the legends and songs that have originated in this city are filled with the longing for a prophesised day, on which the city will be smashed to pieces by five blows in rapid succession from a gigantic fist. That is also the reason why the city has a fist on its coat of arms.

If a project is described as 'utopian' in ordinary conversation, this typically implies that the speaker thinks the project is impractical and idealistic. Much less common is an occasion where a project, or a setting, is described as dystopian, i.e., horrible, disturbing, etc. So our starting point is not very promising: in this module we are going to be talking about ideas that are either unpleasant or a waste of time! However, one does not have to spend much of a day in conversation before encountering a speaker who clearly thinks that some course of action, or some class of objects, etc. is/are particularly good. So somewhere between our general propensity to judge things as being either good or bad, and our capacity to evaluate projects, proposals, and descriptions as 'utopian', lie areas of discourse which we might describe as being informed or structured by 'utopian impulses' e.g. the reconstruction of Iraq, the Yellow River Project in China, President Bush's second term proposals for getting humans to Mars, President Obama's aspirations for Health Care for America's poorest and, of course, whatever is now going to replace the Tokyo Accord on Climate Change. In each case we encounter a proposal or project that is presented in such a way as to identify outcomes that are thought to be overwhelmingly positive - in a sense, we are given a programme which, if we enact it, should result in the desired end(s). Such evaluations may be contested, and they are often driven by political and/or economic considerations which may, or may not, be declared, but it is important to recognise that this type of thinking is special - if you want to grab a familiar model from the programme of Education Studies - think of Plato's Republic, or Rousseau's Émile. This style of thinking, then, aspires to be very different from what is sometimes called 'pragmatic' thinking, i.e., solely concerned with the practical means of attaining whatever course of action seems to be appropriate at the time.

Utopian thinking is typically principled in its proposals and visionary in its descriptions of goals. It imagines a final state of affairs in which people, objects, and their various inter-relationships are judged to be better than present conditions allow. Again, typically, this change is depicted as resting on a few factors that are identified by the writer. The history of the last century is littered with failed experiments that can be fitted into this scheme: Hitler's Germania, Mussolini's revitalised fascist Italy, Lenin and Trotsky's initial conception of Bolshevik Russia, Ghandi's sense that the dignity of village craft would be the 'glue' that could bind a reborn India together, Nasser's dreams of becoming the leader of a new confederation of Arab states, Ho Chi Min's and Mao's aspirations for their respective country's independence, etc. Managing social change seems to be a tough call, and often one is more dazzled or depressed by the vision of a possible future than one is convinced by the stated (or even unstated) mechanisms by which these futures are said to become possible. This might be because in utopian representations human change is typically represented as principled (while in dystopian accounts it is instead represented as chaotic and 'beyond' control). The reality we all live with is, of course, usually much more evenly balanced than either of these alternatives and more 'pragmatic' - to introduce that word again. For every Martin Luther King and Barrack Obama there has to be some grouping of people with a more practical bent who will attempt to implement the big idea. Considering his previous reputation for cynicism, manipulation, and 'pork-barrel politics', President Lyndon Johnson offers an instructive example. Initially paired with President Kennedy as his 'heavy', Johnson managed to sustain Kennedy's vision of the 'Great Society' after his assassination through many political and economic vicissitudes - and for a surprisingly long time.

But often politicians have not been so lucky, or able to leave behind such benign 'wreckage' from which others can start the process of rebuilding again. President Eisenhower, supreme allied commander during the Second World War and responsible for bringing together the greatest concentration of military might the world had ever seen, was subsequently responsible for steering America through the start of the Cold war and the build up of his country's nuclear arsenal. In his last speech on leaving the White House he ended his control of the republic on a warning note: 'Beware of the military-industrial complex. It can destroy all our democratic values.' (quoted in Virilio, 2002: 162). In other words, precisely that which had allowed his country to triumph over two dictatorships and survive in the nuclear age was now regarded by its principal defender as the greatest source of danger facing his country. So, to recap, whether principled action results in the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, in the Nazi death camps, or in the eventual 'victory' of the West over the Soviet Block, bringing utopian visions into reality is difficult, and either the vision gets lost amongst a mass of pragmatic considerations, or else the harshness of unbendingly principled action destroys those trying to bring utopia closer to reality, e.g. the 'terror' of the French Revolution. However, in this module our purpose is not so much to set up court over a selection of shattered dreams - being satisfyingly wise after the event - as to understand better the processes and assumptions that surround the utopian impulse itself.

And by way of practice and preparation:-

In the lecture you will be invited to examine the utopian/dystopian potential of the theme of regeneration. Your task will be to imagine/identify instances of regeneration, picture the situations within which they occur and which they precipitate, and then work through the resulting consequences in whatever way interests you. Remember, our task is not simply to be speculative with ideas, but to use them as a means to arrive at critical perspectives on the present.

Notes

The squabbles over the definition of iconology, and its relationship to iconography, could fill a book. In summary, the competing groups are:- 1) that iconology can be a scientific theory about images in culture, i.e. a 'science' of images, 2) that iconology is a metatheory of imagery, i.e. an attempt to develop a theoretical language capable of dealing with image-making in society but itself drawn apart from such practices, 3) a comparison of verbal and visual art forms, 4) an inter-media study of image-making and consuming habits, and 5) a means to reconsider the nature of ideology itself; and this is Mitchell's own interest, both at the end of his book, Iconology, and throughout its sequel, Picture Theory. Iconography emerges from these debates as something different again, often loosely described as the 'language of the arts'. In practice it is both more precise and more parochial than recent attempts at iconology have been, more concerned with the kinds of detail one associates with typical art historical accounts, although many practitioners of this form of study are willing to consider a wider range of artefacts. Another way of thinking about the difference is that while iconography concerns itself with how aspects of art-works in particular have meaning within a particular culture, the more traditional versions of iconology adopt a holistic and even timeless view of images themselves, being less concerned with particular examples situated within specific cultures.

Bibliography

Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions London: Routledge.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1998) Picture Theory Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Virilio, P. (2002) Crepuscular Dawn Cam. MAS.: MIT Press.

Additional notes for texts that inform the genre historically

More's Utopia (access via the web), for all its strangeness and perfection, is both a model and a prescription of the genre. In one sense the society he describes is in stasis, but rather than this being the basis for criticism, More emphasises its dynamic relationship with the rest of the world, one governed so as to maintain its place, rather than responding to some imperialistic impulse to colonise and turn the rest of the world into an extension of itself. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis is very different, advocating the setting up of a process of progressive change and refinement to technological aids. Arguably, this short text set the precedent for nearly all the examples which followed. And perhaps only now, at the eleventh hour, are we starting to claw our way back towards something approaching More's conception of society in dynamic stasis, e.g. for instance, this concept is at the heart of James Lovelock's Gaia.

The following three texts can be described as 'canonical'. Moore's gives us the main rhetorical form, Shakespeare's Tempest allows a preliminary canter through notions of childhood and childishness, and Bacon - as suggested above - provides the model for nearly all of the assumptions we have had for the last two hundred years about the genre's typical content and intent.

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis

(As the text is short I have used a web-based version - hence no page numbers. Apart from its use of the rhetorical form, the main thing to understand is the nature , purpose, and social significance of the House of the Six Days Work, i.e., Saloman's House.)

At the start, do we know the status of the narrator - and does this significantly change?
The first paragraph provides a typical transposition - a rhetorical device in which the narration following is separated off from the assumed context of the writer and reader.
The second and fourth paragraphs contain these lines, 'yellower than our parchment' and 'far more glossy than ours'. These are the first of a number of transcriptions by which Bacon conveys both the unfamiliar by means of the familiar, and also conveys a relation of excess or plenitude which the imaginary place of New Atlantis holds with respect to our own condition.
There are a number of points in the text where an implicit contrast is drawn with Bacon's own context. The most telling of these is that Bacon himself lost his position at court because he was charged with having accepted gifts to 'aid' his decision-making. 'So he left us; and when we offered him some pistolets, he smiling, said, "He must not be twice paid for one labour:" meaning (as I take it) that he had salary sufficient of the State for his service.'
The second of these comes in the next paragraph, where apparently the populace greet the foreigners in 'so civil a fashion, ... .' By all accounts this would not be the normal mode of reception in Bacon's England.
Even in New Atlantis there is a strict hierarchy, and it is assumed that 'strangers' will similarly be so organised: 'They having cast it (as it seemeth) that four of those chambers, which were better than the rest, might receive four of the principal men of our company'.
After the first quarter of the text, the narrator begins to become more obviously individualised; the 'we' becomes a 'me'.
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of Bensalem is the fact that it rigorously controls its borders, is very cautious about extending citizenship to 'strangers', and even within the State, there is control of access to knowledge. (Cf. also More's arrangements for meeting with strangers in his Utopia, and Caliban's conviction that in the whole of Prospero's island he is its only natural inhabitant.)
There is a striking 'myth' of origin. Like many utopian accounts a place is found for the fantastic, and its principal task is to provide a means by which contemporary rules and knowledges can be exceeded. For Bacon, this is intimately related to a religious perspective on the relationship of the world to God: 'And forasmuch as we learn in our books that thou never workest miracles, but to a divine and excellent end (for the laws of Nature are thine own laws, and thou exceedest them not but upon great causes)'.
Halfway through the text we get the account of Saloman's House. This is a preliminary account which simply conveys the idea that there is an institutionalised collection of knowledge from all possible sources.
This is interrupted by an account of the 'Feast of the Family', information about gender differentiation, and then we meet up with another familiar utopian character, Joabin the Jew, a mediator who is typically marginalised in the society but therefore particularly well suited to translate its customs to strangers. It falls to him to explain the details of the marriage laws, and as these are relayed there is an implicit reference to More's own Utopia; 'I have read in a book of one of your men, of a feigned commonwealth, where the married couple are permitted before they contract, to see one another naked.'
Finally, in the last quarter we get a more detailed definition of Saloman's House and an exhaustive list of the process by which knowledge is gathered. Since these details also figure in Bacon's Advancement of Learning and his Great Instauration, they should be carefully attended to, because upon them must rest the claim that Bacon is England's first empiricist. The text provides us with named classes of individuals, each class of which corresponds to one step in the process by which Bacon think knowledge is to be gathered: the merchants of light gather books, etc. from other parts, the depradators isolate the experiments, the 'mystery-men' sort out non-experimental knowledge, the pioneers or miners try selected new experiments, the compilers draw these together and attempt to formulate axioms, maxims, and other forms of useful knowledge, the lamps identify further experiments aimed at deepening knowledge and understanding, the inoculators conduct these 'higher' experiments, and finally there are the 'interpreters of nature' who 'raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms.

Thomas More's Utopia

(All page references relate to the 2002 edition of the Penguin Classic, based on the 1965 translation of Paul Turner. Here, the main interest in the text is to note its extensive and detailed presentation of a particular rhetorical form. However, note 24 introduces the section on hedonism - this is transformed by the Nineteenth Century Utilitarians - a group and a philosophy which we cover in week 3.)

All of Book 1 can be considered as one in its rhetorical positioning. It rapidly introduces a believable context in which a conversation with a Utopian provides the pretext for a distanced and critical review of contemporary England and Europe. As such it is surprisingly critical, given More's position in public life at the time, but the form always allows More the means to effect an escape - it is, after all, just a make-believe world and the description is a description of an amusing fantasy - more an intellectual exercise than a critique. (But just how perilous these times were - despite his use of this fictional form - may be judged by the fact that the book was only published in Latin, was never published in England during his lifetime, and when a version in English was eventually produced it was some fifteen years after More's death.) More uses it to present initial formulations of most of the arguments which will be matched by 'answers' which are provided by the alternative Utopian practices described in Book 2. (Book 2 itself presents an almost unbroken description of Utopia.)
More's letter to Peter Gilles, and Gilles reply, provides the initial transposition and also introduces an intermediate mediator, Peter Gilles, and a typically marginal actual mediator in the form of Raphael Nonsenso. We are also immediately reminded of the classical parallel with Plato's Republic.
P. 16 - Raphael is introduced.
P. 19 - an initial review of the contemporary world context.
P. 24 - a more detailed review of the European one.
P. 25 - an extensive critique of the contemporary English scene, with direct references to the Peasants' Revolt and the impact of the enclosure movement initiated by the nobles and land-owning gentry.
P. 27 - a suggested pattern for actual reform in England
P. 29 - the first of many apparently amusing accounts - the practices of the inhabitants of Tallstoria - but like many there is a point to the joke and sometimes this is rather sharp, as in this case where there is an implicit review of the legislation relating to theft in particular and crime in general.
P. 37 - another extensive example of the pretext of utopian discourse to review aspects of the present context, in this case the practices of kings.
P. 44 - another reference to Plato's Republic, and from the brief joke given there to a sustained critique of capitalism.
P. 45 - but half-way down this page More presents a critique of communism.
Book 2 starts with a detailed example of a description of the 'space' of Utopia, and although this starts off by sounding like a piece of inventive geography, it rapidly becomes a description of an ideal land-form and urbanised territory.
P. 50 - introductory comments on communal life.
P. 53 - the absence of private property and the universal institution within their towns of gardening.
P. 54 - an initial description of local government.
P. 55 - farming practices and principles identified as part of all general education.
P. 56 - definition of the working day, and further remarks on education.
P. 57 - the benefit of universal labour.
P. 59 - the cultivation of the mind is identified as the highest good. Introduction to the family.
P. 64 - freedom of movement is denied without permission.
P. 66 - the use of credit arrangements with foreign traders and mercenaries in order to wage war by proxy.
P. 67 - excellent example of utopian inversion: the inverted valuation of gold and silver is described - gold used for chamber pots, etc., and then the Flatulentines are used to illustrate the idea in more detail, and to convey a more biting critique of More's contemporary context. In this respect, More comes very close to the technique which will dominate Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
P. 70 - a brief description of State Education, leading on to a critique of contemporary academic practices in relation to Scholasticism in general and the teaching of academic logic in particular.
P. 71 - this starts an extended review of the Utopian's basic assumptions about the purpose of life and the ethical conduct of their affairs. It initially reflects a number of positions developed by Aristotle in his ethics, and becomes a sustained argument for the kind of hedonism, or 'calculus of pleasures' which was promoted by the Utilitarians - introduced by Jeremy Bentham and refined by John Stuart Mill, whose own account of the philosophy is close at times to More's.
P. 23 - More's definition of the Utopian 'natural'.
P. 78 - the hierarchy of pleasures - to be refined by John Stuart Mill some two hundred years later.
P. 82 - the treatment of strangers and the use of slaves.
P. 83 - euthanasia and marriage customs.
P. 87 - a joking critique of the legal system of More's own time by means of an account of that of Utopia's - another good example of an inversion.
P. 88 - the same, only this time directed towards the practice of Kings signing treaties with other sovereign powers which they then break. Stated directly, this becomes almost treasonable, and is a reminder of why More may have adopted this rhetorical form in the first place.
P. 90 - scandalous, but in a different way. What one is presented with here is a critique of contemporary warring practices in Europe, along with the advocacy of regicide - again treasonable.
P. 97 - unlike Bacon, More rarely uses transcription to render the strange and unknown familiar: here he does so in describing Utopian armour, which apparently has properties which are exactly the reverse of the armour known to all in the time of Henry VIII.
P. 100 - religious tolerance is introduced. Again, not only does the convention of utopian writing allow More to make a timely request for tolerance, in the light of Henry VIII's disputes with the Pope, it also points to a wider dispute threatening to split Europe into two factions: catholic and protestant. (More was later to publish an attack against Luther when he became Lord Chancellor, and he was also unforgiving in his treatment of protestant heretics until he was removed from power.)
P. 110 - a winding down and recapitulation before the description ends.

William Shakespeare's The Tempest

(Shakespeare's texts are usually numbered by line, so in what follows the numbers refer to lines, rather than to pages. I have relied upon the New Penguin Shakespeare, edited by Anne Barton, and first printed in 1965, although there have been many reprints and additional comments added since then. As indicated in the lecture, our main interest here is to use it as a starting point for thinking about the representation of children and education in utopian texts. Shakespeare does use some of the rhetorical devices which also feature in the other two texts, but as a dramatic performance there are also other tricks of the trade added. We can discuss these in the seminar session next week, but for now familiarise yourself with these sections of the play and try to fill in the many gaps using your imagination.)

Act 1, scene 1, line 1 - we are immediately thrown into a transposition of individuals who, in their various ways, will be our proxies - representatives of our contemporary world in the new world of Prospero's island.
Act 1, scene 2, line 1 - an extended sequence which starts by introducing us both to Prospero and his daughter, Miranda
line 34 - Miranda begins to reflect on her nature.
line 70 - Prospero starts to explain how they came to their present pass.
line 140 - Prospero concludes the transposition of himself and Miranda.
line 180 - Prospero explains the purpose of the tempest, and then introduces Ariel
The ensuing discussion is typical and Ariel takes on a role which is part mediator and part something else which we have not yet come across: the figure of the trickster. Ariel is the proximate means by which Prospero effects changes on the island and the circumstances of his victims. Ariel is granted a limited degree of independence, but acts primarily as the agent of the fantastic. As such he is clearly not human, but neither is he like the monstrous Caliban. There is a sense in which he appears to be childlike, but in other ways he is not. Is Ariel a Christian or a Pagan spirit? - such questions mattered at the time the play was performed.
line 312 - Caliban enters. Like Ariel, he in part takes on the role of mediator later on in the play, but also like Ariel he introduces a new figure - the utopian/dystopian monster/slave. Far from being a 'child of nature', Caliban is the son of the witch, Sycorax. Yet it is clear that part of his character is exceptionally 'earthy' and intended to act as a kind of rustic foil to the pretensions of some of Prospero's victims. There is also the interesting fact that he speaks, and was brought up with Miranda until he attempted to rape her. In what sense is/was this act 'unnatural'?
Act 2, scene 2, line 1 - a more extended introduction to Caliban, in which his nature is progressively revealed through interaction with the shipwrecked travellers.
Act 111, scene 1, line 1 - an extended exchange between Miranda and Ferdinand which again demonstrates their respective natures through dialogue, rather than description.
line 49 - Miranda declares her ignorance.
Act 111, scene 3, line 54 - Ariel declares the way things are. This section comes closest to providing the pretext for Peter Greenaway's production, Prospero's Books.
Act V, scene 1. This section is worth following through, as in it Prospero declares his relationship to the spirit world, and to his own sources of knowledge and power. Effectively, he is about to renounce his fantastic sovereignty over the island in exchange for a return to the contemporary form of sovereignty familiar to Shakespeare's audience.