Anarchism is Back. We May Now Re(dis)cover Utopia1 Ronald Creagh Université Paul Valéry, Montpelier III, France Citation: Ronald Creagh, “Anarchism Is Back. We May Now Re(dis)cover Utopia”, Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, no. 6, Autumn/Winter 2007, pp. 61-83 <http://ler.letras.up.pt > ISSN 1646-4729. To Ferro Piludo and Lucia Salimei who, several decades ago, raised in a very brilliant way the cosmic aspect of utopia. * Le sens d'une interrogation ne se démontre ni ne se réfute. Il est affaire de conviction, et c'est en tant que tel qu'il guide le travail des scientifiques et intervient dans leurs controverses. Mais cette conviction n'est pas pour autant arbitraire: elle se nourrit du passé pour définir ce que pourrait être demain une nouvelle cohérence de nos sciences. Cette cohérence ne devrait plus traduire une hiérarchie, expression d'un jugement, mais une exigence dont chaque science aurait la charge: l'exigence de rendre explicite, dans le concept singulier de son objet, et notamment dans la manière singulière dont il articule hasard et nécessité, le type de question qui en assure l'accès le plus pertinent, le type de regard et de pratique qu'il a fallu apprendre pour devenir capable d'en reconnaître la singularité. Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers Introduction Utopia is generally understood as an act of the mind, a creation of individual or collective imagination. By contrast, it is in the actual world that we meet growth, violence, connections, competition, life and death. It is in the name of that reality that we are taught and governed. We need hard facts and, even if we hate reality, it’s the only place where we can find a good drink, meat and potatoes. Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 62 How then could we abide in utopia, which by definition is nowhere? How can we return to the various ages of utopia, which Marx considered as superseded by science and which some philosophers equate with totalitarianism? Yet present day alternative movements proclaim that other worlds are possible and their antiauthoritarian forms of organization give rise to thousands of new dreams. Is all this world movement confined to marginality, is it literally outlandish, in the outskirts of nothingness? Utopia is at the crossroads between the actual world and collective imagination. It questions nothing less than a world vision, because it is a query about reality. The first part of this paper will discuss reality as it is defined by the anti-utopians. An alternate view will be offered in the second part, which is titled “Where is nowhere?”. However, utopia is much more than a creative process of building castles in the air, or a field of study in which specialists study these castles; thus, the third part will discuss the contemporary rediscovery of anarchism in alternative political and social movements as well as in art, and what this implies for a present day understanding of utopia. Indeed, utopia is the challenge to reality, which will be discussed in the first part. Reality and its Students Ron Suskind, a well-known American journalist, once received this comment from one of President George W. Bush’ senior advisers: We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.2 Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 63 Such a comment echoes the biblical Adam naming each creature in paradise, thus creating human reality as he is taking possession of every animal.3 In the same way, leaders, delegates, presidents or heads of state paint a picture of reality and their flocks usually accept their presentation of events. Of course, many patterns are drawn by collectivities, and their prestigious guides engrave those portrayals. The media generally pick up those which are produced by the maestros and transform them into common knowledge. Power’s dirty little secret is that it may create reality just by naming it. Such was Humpty Dumpty’s lesson to Alice: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master -- that's all.’ (Carroll 1872: chap. VI) The custodians of tradition declare what is essential. For instance, in religions such as Christianity, people did not and do not concede any substance to this life.4 Everything in the environment refers to some superhuman being(s); individual and collective history is interpreted as the discourse of such entities. The faithful rely on shamans, prophets, priests and sacred writings to read the message enclosed in each event of their lives. This function was and is still also accomplished by scholars and more recently by technocrats, who are the present day successors of the clerics, while the vast majority of the population relies more and more on the narratives of the media, which are the voices of their rulers.5 Legislators decide what is appropriate or unauthorized, not the individual conscience as Henry David Thoreau would have wished. High level experts in Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 64 every field stipulate what is dangerous or harmless, and they are, in some way, the administrators of collective fears. Unsurprisingly, disbelievers, dissenters and rebels offer divergent representations of the world. Materialist thinkers, for instance, confine utopia to the ephemeral and immaterial realm of fantasy and ideals. Karl Marx’s stand on utopia is well known, and it is commanded by his interpretation of “reality”. The Communist Manifesto drew a strict line and inaugurated a new paradigm: The significance of critical-utopian socialism and communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justifications. (Marx/Engels 1848) History was Marx’s conception of reality, not imagination. Dialectical materialism was to replace naïve visions of the world, his theory was to be substituted for utopian socialism as capitalism had removed feudalism. In the course of history, there was no return. Reality was a one way road of progress through science. “It would certainly be very pleasant if a really scientific socialist journal were to be published”, wrote Marx to Engels (Marx 1968). To ideology, Marx opposed historical development, which he interpreted as the concrete historical process of production. Ideologues as well as utopians were kept captive by their fantasies, and so were the socialists of the past who wished to abolish the causes of class struggle rather than consider those relations of production as the key to social change. Sure, utopia contained the germs of socialist critical materialism, but it was not only an uncompleted analysis because it was set up on an improper ground. It was now to be superseded by Marx’s own revolutionary theory (apud Morton 1963: 37). The fantasies of utopia, its Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 65 doctrinaire scientism, its lack of a theory of history were to be replaced by the revolutionary science of history. Communism had to bid farewell to Fourier, Owen and the others. While many Marxists perpetuated that stance, the tradition was far from monolithic. Within the so-called Frankfurt school, a philosopher like Adorno understood reality differently. For him, totality already exists, utopia is only the longing for the new, it can only be a fresh experience, a new combination of some of the possibilities within a spectrum, but the spectrum remains the same. People are like a child in front of a piano, searching for an unheard chord. The chord is there since all the possible combinations are limited. In effect, the quest for utopia would often cause the repetition of the same, particularly of the catastrophes of the past, as he would remind his colleague, Walter Benjamin. It was through a revision of history that Walter Benjamin had tried to rehabilitate utopia. He saw each new stage of production as accompanied by a collective imagination which compared the future with the mythical past and strived to both suppress and sublimate the inadequacies of the social product and the failings of the social order of production (Benjamin 1989: 3). Utopias functioned in a rather ambivalent way since they would be used both as a tool for the critique of society and a means of transfiguration. In a later work, as he took into account Adorno’s remarks, Benjamin considered the mythical elements of utopia. These were the reference to the idealized past and the transfiguration of the present. What mattered was the history of the losers. Therefore the past was irretrievable when the present did not recognize itself in it. The present created a political link by recalling the past and Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 66 redeeming it. By recognizing itself in the past, both present and past were transformed, thus preventing the tradition of the oppressed and their inheritors, the present historical agent, from being co-opted by the class that dominates them (Benjamin 1977: 1247-1248). The return of the past was also the repetition of the catastrophe – the Third Reich – and the mythification of the future could also bring its return. It was therefore necessary to consider its function as an awakening of the forces of emancipation but, at the same time, to consider in a critical way the reciprocal relation of utopia and its reservoir of passions. Benjamin still identified reality with history, particularly the catastrophe of World War I: For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. (Benjamin 1968: 83-4) Reality could be the eternal return of catastrophe. Such a conception was different from Marxist thought, which considered progress as inevitable. This distinct view of history related to a contrasting perception of utopia. There was a rehabilitation of human subjectivity, even though it was to be supervised by critical reason. Not surprisingly, the neo-liberal stand, as exemplified by one of its major proponents, Frederich Hayek, of the Austrian school, is not very distant from Marx’s conception of reality. Reality is identified not with history but rather with the self-regulated market, which Hayek sees as natural a process as the self- regulated population of animals in an ecological niche – an erroneous interpretation, by the way, because in an ecosystem, self-regulation cannot occur at the level of the niche, it is the system that is self-regulating.6 Such an institution Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 67 reveals its superiority in creativity and progress. The utopia of central planning, on the contrary, destroys individual liberty and prevents the natural emergence, without design, of self-organizing structures. The determinism of the market replaces, in Hayek’s theory, the determinism of history, which he totally rejects. In sum, human destiny depends on the free market.7 The new form of capitalist globalization has been accompanied by a choir of anti-utopian thinkers. In Germany, it was particularly declamatory; in France, the so-called “nouveaux philosophes” made the headlines of the media.8 The fall of the Berlin wall offered a new occasion to identify utopia with the communist state. Thus Marxism was accused of being utopian and therefore messianic and apocalyptical. Its propagators were the false prophets who erroneously predicted the downfall of the capitalist system. Utopian thought was inherently vicious because, in fine, it was totalitarian and engendered concentration camps and the return of the catastrophes.9 Indeed, while some writers made extravagant comments, endeavouring to demonstrate how utopias of happiness were indeed dystopias, their real target was the political utopia, because it endangered the status quo and the powers that be. As long as ideas remained in the field of literature, most often limited to a minority of literates, they were a harmless pleasure; but all the whistles would blow as soon as someone questioned the political systems. As a substitute to the rejection of utopia, contemporary society offers a number of myths which, of course, surround the ideology of the free market like the clouds around the Biblical God.10 There is a proliferation of myths of happiness Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 68 propagated by the advertising industry: well-being through consumption, success stories of the jet set, democracy through the free market and so on. Myth is also presented as utopia, as indeed both are often mingled. It is true, their respective definitions vary considerably, and some clarification is now appropriate. I will refer to a distinction that is broadly in the line of Gustav Landauer, Karl Mannheim, Mircea Eliade, Gilbert Durand and Cornelius Castoriadis. Myths refer essentially to the symbolic order which is seen by a society as its ultimate reference. As Gilbert Durand writes, it is the pre-semiotic language in which the body movements of rite, cult and magic act as a substitute for grammar and lexicon.11 Myth accredits a reality which may be attained through ritual and is seen as essential. Myth is reality par excellence. The function and importance of myths vary through time according to the various types of society. In contemporary complex cultures they are imbedded in a multiplicity of national and global as well as specific ideologies. They may explain the supposed origin of the world, as Mircea Eliade says, but also appear in the rituals of power, such as the Hippocratic Oath or the oath of office, which are meant to countenance the quest for authority and honour of some of the present hierarchies. Most of them are less universal though pretending to universality and more easily manipulated by the narrators and in nation-states it is particularly the reality of the hierarchical order. The cap and gown, the crown and the flag may no longer have the same importance as in the past, other symbols have replaced them, particularly with which group you may mix. Free market remains the gospel Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 69 that reminds you of the hard facts of life, the evidence of the market, and the nonsense of utopian political thought.12 While in the past human fate was identified with history, it is today linked to the free market or some other grand narrative enriched by myth and ritual. Indeed, utopia does not belong to such a world, it can only be nowhere. Where is nowhere? As is well known, the word utopia was coined by Thomas More, from the Greek ou-topos (“no place”). In fact, the manuscript he first sent to his friend Erasmus in 1516 bore the title Nusquama, which in Latin means “nowhere”. It also was a pun on eu-topos (“the good place”). This refined Renaissance double entendre was forgotten by the Western tradition, and while successive philosophers referred to antecedents such as Plato’s Republic and, more seldomly, to the Ta te Ching of Lao Tzu, they tend to distort the idea of “the good place” as being “the ideal society” or, on the opposite, to identify “nowhere” with “nothingness”. What can “nowhere” mean for us today? It cannot be nothingness, which is a metaphysical concept today mostly used to defend creationism: by its very definition, nothingness does not exist. Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded describes a chilly banquet in which the Professor says: "I hope you'll enjoy the dinner — such as it is; and that you won't mind the heat — such as it isn't." A comment follows: “The sentence sounded well, but somehow I couldn't quite understand it …” (Carroll 1893: chap. 22) Nothingness does not mean void, either, because the idea of void refers to space. Nowhere seems to be a stupid word, an answer given to us when we look for things which we cannot find or are non-existent. But what if we ask ourselves Spaces of Utopia 6 (Autumn/Winter 2007) (cid:1)(cid:1) 70 the question: where is the universe? Of course, we know no answer; or we may say that the question is stupid or irrelevant. However, we may not say that humanity will never discover one. And we realize that beyond the universe there can be no space, because it would also belong to the cosmos and therefore would not be beyond it. Even if we consider that the absence of space does not mean that there may not be other universes, differently structured, it is not irrelevant to say that the universe is nowhere.13 Yet it exists. If utopia is nowhere, it may be seen as a metaphor of the universe. And since utopia is contrasted with reality, one must ask if any thought about reality should not start with a discussion about cosmology rather than with an anthropocentric interpretation of history or free market. One must then notice that the Western philosophical view of the universe as reality has since its origins been elaborated in opposition to chaos. In the Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths, in the Book of Genesis, the story of creation is one of victory over chaos. In Plato’s Timaeus, the demiurge imposes order (Plato 1957: 33, 160). Aristotle, who does not feel any necessity to refer to a cosmogonal myth, offers a philosophical ground for the understanding of a beginning: Principles account for, and establish, the order of the world. As principles of knowledge, beginnings are the origins of thought. As principles of being, they are the sources of origination per se. Beginnings in the political or social sphere are due to archai or principes – those who command. (Hall 1982: 58)14 Chaos is unprincipled, an-archic, without archai. And as David Hall writes, The dread of anarchy that is so much a part of our cultural heritage is in large measure related to the primordial fear of chaos that is its presumed attendant. The political anarchy that Carlyle found “the hatefullest of things” is but an expression of “the waste Wide Anarchy of Chaos,” which John Milton saw personified as the “Anarch old”. (idem, 53)