Man/woman since time immemorial have posited Utopias as an ideal to reach for as a New Jerusalem.
Utopia is now five hundred years old. First published in Leuven in 1516, it stands at the confluence of three currents: Renaissance humanism, the print revolution, and what is sometimes still called ‘the age of discovery’ – notably of the Americas, though these lands probably hadn’t escaped the notice of the peoples who had lived there for 12,000 years before the Europeans showed up.
It is of interest to note that Anerican native Indians were indifferent to gold and other European
gewgaws (a showy thing) which they believed was worthless.
One of the most striking contributions that Utopia made to political thought was in imagining the ideal state – if that’s what it is – as a place, rather than as a pallid aggregate of principles
Foucault riffed on this notion with his hétérotopie, an elsewhere where the ‘else’ matters as much as the ‘where’, though for some this is no more than the realising of a caprice (suggesting a convulsive shudder in which your hair stood on end at such unimaginable beauty.
Earlier versions of Utopia were duly mapped as a place some where in the Atlantic,
Most earlier conceptions of Utopia had a Calvinistic bent (all laudable work no play)
The insular common place in Utopian or Dystopian writing is that of a world apart
underscoring locale (place) as a metonym for transfigured norms.
The ideal Utopia is not emancipation but control, and its token is docility: after all, the beast that Christians usually hold up for humans to mimic is not the lion or the fox, but the sheep. While More does leave room for deviancy, his and other utopias brook little in the way of dissent, least of all in organised form. The warming fantasy of millennial utopians is that political power will one day have dribbled down history’s plughole.
It takes an Irish man to nail Utopias - compare Swift’s airborne Laputa, a satirical takedown of epistemic hubris.
Utopia is now five hundred years old. First published in Leuven in 1516, it stands at the confluence of three currents: Renaissance humanism, the print revolution, and what is sometimes still called ‘the age of discovery’ – notably of the Americas, though these lands probably hadn’t escaped the notice of the peoples who had lived there for 12,000 years before the Europeans showed up.
It is of interest to note that Anerican native Indians were indifferent to gold and other European
gewgaws (a showy thing) which they believed was worthless.
One of the most striking contributions that Utopia made to political thought was in imagining the ideal state – if that’s what it is – as a place, rather than as a pallid aggregate of principles
Foucault riffed on this notion with his hétérotopie, an elsewhere where the ‘else’ matters as much as the ‘where’, though for some this is no more than the realising of a caprice (suggesting a convulsive shudder in which your hair stood on end at such unimaginable beauty.
Earlier versions of Utopia were duly mapped as a place some where in the Atlantic,
Most earlier conceptions of Utopia had a Calvinistic bent (all laudable work no play)
The insular common place in Utopian or Dystopian writing is that of a world apart
underscoring locale (place) as a metonym for transfigured norms.
The ideal Utopia is not emancipation but control, and its token is docility: after all, the beast that Christians usually hold up for humans to mimic is not the lion or the fox, but the sheep. While More does leave room for deviancy, his and other utopias brook little in the way of dissent, least of all in organised form. The warming fantasy of millennial utopians is that political power will one day have dribbled down history’s plughole.
It takes an Irish man to nail Utopias - compare Swift’s airborne Laputa, a satirical takedown of epistemic hubris.
Le Guin picks up the Promethean rationalism – Eurocentric and phallocratic – behind much utopian thought, and offers in its place something more squidgy. Utopia is not somewhere but it is interstitial, moist, dark, cyclical, a place in the sense that a hole is a place. Now some people like entering holes and filling them – the problem being, as Le Guin points out, that a filled-up hole no longer is one. So with Utopia. It’s a place that isn’t one, reached by a route that goes nowhere: as the old joke goes, if you want to get there, don’t start from here.
Le Guin notes that few thinkers produce utopias these days: there is nothing to compare with the 19th-century boom in utopian socialist writing. Instead, dystopias come a dime a dozen and often serve frankly conservative ends
However historically there is an eclenchic deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources. for Utopian thinking
and today's utopia’s most visible torch-bearers are the prophets of the caliphate on the one hand, and of a neoliberal Bluetopia on the other.
Like Hayek, it might be said of Trump's snapshot of the promised land, by contrast, is one in which sin has been exorcised from humanity and consecrated in the state/swamp.
No comments:
Post a Comment