[I]t is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they offered visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation...Indeed, the attempt to establish positive criteria of the desirable society characterizes liberal political theory from Locke to Rawls, rather than the diagnostic interventions of the Utopians, which, like those of the great revolutionaries, always aim at the alleviation and elimination of the sources of exploitation and suffering, rather than at the composition of blueprints for bourgeois comfort. The confusion arises from the formal properties of these texts, which also seem to offer blueprints: these are however maps and plans to be read negatively, as what is to be accomplished after the demolitions and the removals, and in the absence of all those lesser evils the liberals believed to be inherent in human nature.
It seems a little counter-intuitive at first. Utopias are negative? Surely the whole point of a utopia is to offer a positive vision of what is to be done; to provide a riposte to those who say "you're always moaning, but how would your world look?"? In a sense, that was my motivation in writing a utopia ('The Island') for this project: I think that this country is being governed in an increasingly hierarchical manner- but I don't think that the Labour Party or the institutional left has any real answers. Rather than just moan about this state of affairs I want to try and create a space (albeit a fictional one) that might have some suggestions; might distribute political power in a nonhierarchical manner. But in hoping that people approach my utopia with positivity- in asking them to believe in it- am I falling into a liberal trap?
I'd like to think I'm not, but I also think I know the point that Jameson is trying to make.
I certainly don't want to offer The Island as the be all and end all of political development: it may well be a place of co-operation, happiness and fulfillment, but it will also be a space of upheaval, sorrow, pain and suffering*. I don't want it to be read as a 'blueprint' that can be followed to bring about 'the good life'. It is a space of suggestions, not a space of answers. Suggestions will always bring forth new questions. They will not be adequate forever.
* * * *
I believe in what I call 'nomadic utopianism', which rejects transcendent schema in favour of prefigurative, immanent modes of becoming and which believes that a utopia is a society constantly being remade by those who inhabit it, rather than a static state of perfection. The nomadic utopia is not based on eternal principles ('justice', 'fairness', etc); but on fleeing from a hierarchical present. It draws its power from what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would call 'lines-of flight'.
Nomadic utopianism, then, is negative. It is a fleeing from hierarchy, not a move to a pre-determined utopia (such a philosophy I call State Utopianism, but that is for another time). It is in fleeing that nomadic utopianism creates something positive; shapes its utopia. This utopia may, however, see the return of hierarchy, and so the negative utopianism must never be allowed to dissipate into positive celebrations.
However noble our aims, whenever we put the flag in the ground and say 'here we are, this is the site of victory- this is our utopia' (as [neo]liberals have done) we betray that utopia and condemn it to hierarchy and dystopia.
Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed details this powerfully, I think, and I am also fond of Tom Moylan's message to those living in a the 'utopian' society of Whileaway in the Joanna Russ story of the same name. He tells them to
be historically vigilant...do not lock in the utopian achievement, do not remove the social utopia from the processes of time. Don’t cut a deal with the false utopian devil of your own collective imagination as it dreams of the end of history; and don’t cover up the deal by changing the colony from that of a place-in-process to one of eternal delight, literally allowing time to while away…[do] not…let the process of learning and change end, [do] not…risk a situation- brought about by either internal or external forces- that might “take away the meaning” of life.
* * * *
This is all a little confusing, though. A negativity that creates something positive? That doesn't seem to make much sense. It is perfectly possible to do clever things with the meaning of words and reference Adorno's negative dialectics here- but I think a more useful concept comes from the work of John Holloway. Inspired by the Zapatistas (whose claim that 'we make the road by walking' is a fine example of nomadic utopianism), he writes of social change coming from calls 'the scream'.
The scream, he notes, begins as a scream of negativity, of dissonance, of intensely felt pain at the horrors of the current order. It is a response that is felt physically and emotionally as much (and perhaps more than) it is thought. It is the scream that traces lines of flight, the scream that is utopianism. And just as Bakunin wrote that 'the urge to destroy is also a creative urge', this scream resonates as it is articulated begins to create a utopia. As Holloway writes, the scream is 'a refusal to be contained, an overflowing, a going beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of polite society'.
* * * *
Utopia must keep screaming. It must always fill itself to the brim with a utopianism that seeks to go further. It must always go beyond. I hope that I can capture some of this urgency in 'The Island', and by opening it to the public to engage in, I hope the text will remain open and evolving forever (more of this soon): always failing, always screaming, always trying to go beyond...
*I don't want to fall into the trap of saying 'because these are what make us human', but I think that they are sometimes inevitable consequences of freedom (a lesson that all the great dystopias teach us. And the story of man's fall from Paradise, for that matter).
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