Utopias bach

Some thoughts about utopias (Dystopias, sitopias, heterotopias)

Part of the idea behind Utopias Bach is about re-interpreting the word Utopia, re-casting it, re-imagining it to make it something that might help us meet the existential threats of our times at a scale we feel we can influence. After all, doesn’t language have to evolve with the times? Is it possible to ‘decolonise’ Utopia?

The definition of Utopia is:

• an imaginary island described in Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516)
  as enjoying perfection in law, politics, etc.

• (usually lowercase) an ideal place or state.

• (usually lowercase) any visionary system of political or social perfection.

I am drawn to the way it combines the idea of place and system: what I remember from reading Thomas More’s Utopia (years ago), was that no-one should have more than they can look after themselves, everyone has a grounding in agriculture, and no-one who deliberately tries to get into political power is allowed to be a politician.

But Utopias too, are not without their difficulties. Thomas More’s Utopia restricted personal liberties and privacy in ways that make Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four look liberal, adultery was punished by enslavement and men were the top of the strict hierarchy. And there are dangers in the islanding that Utopias suggest, as Greyson Perry’s Map of an Englishman (below) neatly illustrates.

The word Utopia itself comes from the Greek ou-topos and means “no place”. We want to embrace this aspect this in three ways:

1. suggesting we’ll never find utopia, or perhaps that even if a few can, it is not possible to create one for everyone, or to get everyone to agree on what it should be like. So we should not be striving to actually achieve a Utopia, mini or otherwise, but to explore ideas, as experiments, as opportunities to learn. The idea of Radical Imagination is useful in this regard, see below.

2. A conception of ‘no place’ seems particularly relevant in the context of an increasingly ‘no-place’ online world. And during this time of COVID (and pandemics to come), the increase of that global online world (for those with access to it) is coupled with being physically ‘locked down’ to the place where we are. Are we able to work with those online global connections, while focusing on…

3. Utopias BACH: grounding place, a specific place, to soil and co-habitants, the opportunity to be in our milltir sgwâr, our cynefin? This aspect links to what Bruno Latour calls ‘the Terrestrial’. Repurposing a sort of generalist 'no-place’ idea of Utopia to a specific, small scale experimenting, noticing (what is already here) and re-connecting here (rather than looking to somewhere else). This is also talking of a different kind of ‘science’, which is located in specific place, all sorts of knowledge and ways of knowing.

“We need to move from no-where to now - here” - Bruno Latour

There’s an interesting discussion about this with Bruno Latour himself here!

See also “Paths to Utopia” a project in 2016 by Kings College London: collaborations between artists, performers, architects, technologists and King’s academics.

Dystopias vs and within Utopias

Utopian propaganda is tied to some of the worst of England (Britain)/white supremacist legacy: preservation/building of one nation, while plundering and invading human and more-than-human ‘others’ (indeed the entire world) to the point of extinction. The origins of the idea of Utopia is intimately tied with the very moment of European expansion and colonialisation, the beginnings of globalisation. The beliefs intimately tied to Utopia have created a lethal dystopia for human and more-than-human kin.

“Dystopia, a term coined 352 years [after ‘Utopia’] in 1868 by the philosopher J.S. Mill, who used it to denounce the then government’s Irish land policy. Dystopian fictions became popular in the 20th century. Dystopian movies now seem to dominate our screens, all graphically and dramatically prophesying a dire future.

I fear that there is a danger that by populating our imaginations with pictures of a future of suffering by the masses, environmental despoliation, endless conflict and/or the dominance of machines, as in films like Metropolis and Blade Runner and novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four then we could end up creating the very world that we fear. In other words that these prophecies become self-fulfilling.”
- David Thorpe - Utopia and its Discontents

Perhaps the desire for ‘global’ solutions, certainty and control is another aspect of this dystopic mindset. And I see a lot of that: electric cars or reforestation of everything to save the world etc. These sorts of blanket solutions risk creating further dystopias.

Perhaps this is most chillingly described in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower - a novel constructed around the interplay of utopia and dystopia.

This year’s Whitworth Gallery exhibition “Utopias” reinforces the problematic nature of the concept. A guardian review is titled: ”Utopias review – the centuries-old illusion of 'taking back control” says “From Thomas More’s 1516 book to Hogarth’s French invasion plates and Simon Roberts’s Brexit posters, our quest for a future perfect world makes uncomfortable viewing… The hope in Utopias can be found in the final section, curated by the Whitworth Young Contemporaries, a diverse group of 16 to 24-year-olds. “Any utopic thing once enforced, becomes inherently dystopic,” reads the group’s manifesto. Perhaps the only utopia we can really hope for is the one where we agree to disagree.”

I like the sense that the idea of Utopia (framed really as a Heterotopia), could be a place to start conversation, to go deeper into different views, ideas, needs, and to generate a sense of experiment and diversity… this could be located in a physical community, a community of interests, characteristics, or even a temporary community created at an event, as a microcosm, in itself a Utopia bach.

heterotopia

So perhaps the idea of ‘heterotopia’ is a better framework than utopia?

"Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different." - Walter Russell Mead

Heterotopia follows the template established by the notions of utopia and dystopia. The prefix hetero- is from Ancient Greek ἕτερος (héteros, "other, another, different") and is combined with the Greek morpheme τόπος ("place") and means "other place". It is a concept elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe certain cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow ‘other’: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming. Heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. Foucault provides examples: ships, cemeteries, bars, brothels, prisons, gardens of antiquity, fairs, Muslims baths and many more. Heterotopias are a physical representation or approximation of a utopia - a parallel space that contains aspects that are not ideal. A classic example is The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia is a 1974 utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, set in the fictional universe of the seven novels of the Hainish Cycle, e.g. The Left Hand of Darkness. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism (on a satellite planet called Anarres) and revolutionary societies, capitalism, and individualism and collectivism.

THE RADICAL IMAGINATION

“The radical imagination emerges out of radical practices, ways of living otherwise, of cooperating differently, that reject, strain against, or seek to escape from the capitalist, racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, colonial, imperial, militaristic, and fundamentalist forms of oppression that undergird our lives.” Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish

Two Canadian academics, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish have been exploring the power (and pitfalls) of working with radical Imagination, and write beautifully and helpfully about it. You can download a paper of theirs here, and it is really hard to do justice to it in summary, but here goes…

Radical imagination is about imagining change at the roots. This isn’t just a matter of imagining endless fanciful utopias – it is a matter of imagining different tomorrows based on the “what ifs…” of today. What would the world be like if we shifted all military monies towards education? What would the factory look like if it were run by the workers? What would our city look like if it was run by popular committees rather than bought-off bureaucrats? But, importantly, this imagination should never reach the level of providing a schematic or a plan for what the future ought to be, because any such plan would already be poisoned by our own time and place. Similarly, Ernst Bloch suggests it is like “forward dream”, mining the radical possibilities inhabiting a “Not-Yet”, a space in the constant process of becoming of the world, exploring the nagging suspicion that the world might be otherwise.

“It’s not about conquering the world but of making a world capable of holding many worlds.”

They also remind us that the feminist imaginary, recognizing and addressing “the personal as the political” encourages us to dream beyond abstract systemic change towards the transformation of everyday life, to understand the depth of patriarchal habituation and interrogate how we are ourselves reproducing masculinist values of individualism, revolutionary machismo, and false “hierarchies” of oppression (the overvaluing of class over gender, race and other vectors of exploitation). Further, it insisted that radicals not “wait until after the revolution” to solve the problems of patriarchal culture but work tirelessly to rid their movements of it in the here and now.

Meanwhile, Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin suggested that the imagination is “dialogic,” that it emerges individually but out of dialogues between people, ideas, texts and contexts: forms of culture and conviviality that court chaos and uncertainty, to break us out of routines and preconceived expectations. And Susan Buck-Morss talks of how “dreamworlds” operate through things like public monuments, commodity advertising, domestic technologies, and public architecture, insisting that the political imagination is far from immaterial.

I believe an example of working with radical imagination is Sitopia…

SITOPIA

“Food is by far the most powerful medium available to us for thinking and acting together to change the world for the better”.
- Carolyn Steel

The word ‘sitopia’ was coined by Carolyn Steel, architect, lecturer and author of the book Hungry City. Sitopia comes from the greek sitos, meaning food, and is play on the word Utopia. Where Utopia means ‘Good place’ or ‘No place’, Sitopia means ‘Food Place’. Carolyn argues that by reconfiguring our relationship with food we can find new and better ways of living that will arrest the damage we are doing to ourselves and the Earth: Read more here

The Sitopia project aims to build sustainable communities with universal access to high quality nutrition. We belive that food is not a luxury item, but an essential part of life that deserves a central role in civilisation. We aim to connect food producers with food consumers all over the world and ensure that every human being can enjoy good food while making the best use of our planets resources. That means making efficient use of water and available arable land, and also making sure that food is produced closer to where it is consumed to minimise the environmental cost and the financial costs due to transport. In addition we hope to look at cost effective and environmentally safe methods of producing food.