From Impulse to Program and Back Again: The Particularization of the Ideal

"To see traces of the Utopian everywhere… is to naturalize it and imply that it is somehow rooted in human nature". Biologists in general and evolutionary scientists, in particular, would not hesitate to concede to this somewhat Freudian suggestion, posited by Jameson in his 2005 book Archaeologies of the future: the desire called Utopia and other science fictions. A frequently recited maxim in academic biological circles is that life is an extremely unfavorable energetic and dynamic state, as contrasted with death which is a state of easily self-perpetuating equilibrium. Similarly, the very rhetoric of Darwinian evolution implies that life inherently seeks better circumstances, with phrases such as "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection", in which the most enviable position belongs implicitly to the organism best suited to his or her or its surroundings. While Utopianism does seem to be a natural individual quality, idealism has not always been applied to groups. Jameson notes that "attempts to realize Utopia … have been historically … intermittent". And indeed, some periods in history have been characterized by social and political complacency while others have served as a hotbed to ideologies. Similarly, fictional texts exhibit different magnitudes of aspiration toward social change. F.T Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, H.G Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, and Jorge Luis Borges' short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius anticipate the fluctuations at the beginning of the twentieth century in the approach toward the realization of the Utopian.

In Archeologies, Jameson identifies two manifestations of Utopian ideology: the Utopian impulse and the Utopian program. The Utopian impulse is an implicit inclination to better the state of mankind, one that is evident in certain texts, discourses, or practices but is not an explicit proposal of such an undertaking. The Utopian program, on the other hand, is a systemic, overt, organized plan that relates to the current state of society. I propose that these two manifestations of the Utopian exist on a spectrum of realization, where on one extreme is the subtlety of the Utopian impulse and on the other is the Utopian practice, which is the Utopian impulse acknowledged, systemized into a literal Utopian program, and then attempted to be enacted. The Utopian program, placed between these two extremes, is a necessary step on the path from impulse to practice. Communism, Nazism, Fascism, and other projects of the early twentieth century fall under this category of Utopian practices.

Realization of the Utopian in the form of these Utopian practices was not a historical anomaly: stirrings of the Utopian impulse could be registered in the early twentieth century, in such works as The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 Italy. In The Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti voices a call to action, but though it is passionate it is very unfocused: "Come, my friends! ... We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks!" Marinetti calls for violent revolt. However, the alternative reality he proposes is abstracted and anarchic and he does not create a convincing link between his contemporary reality and his proposed reality.  He identifies the evils of his society: the old, the intellectual, the female, and the moralist. He envisions their removal via "picks and hammers". There is nothing, however, of the structure and order necessary to enact a true, comprehensive coup d'état, like Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler would ten and twenty years later after the First World War. As such, the Futurist movement became more of an artistic than a political movement, consisting of the expression of sentiments and emotions tied to an ideology but with no real intention of translation to action.

Soon enough, of course, political leaders would emerge with a Utopian program and would instill Utopian practices. Lenin adopted Marx and Engels' 1848 Communist Manifesto and succeeded in establishing control of Russia; Hitler's programmatic Mein Kampf too soon saw its realization. The Utopian impulse sees its embodiment in these Utopian practices. H.G. Wells' 1933 The Shape of Things to Come can be considered a fictitious counterpart of these rigorously envisioned and structured political movements. In the novel, Wells predicts every aspect of the future of humanity. Beginning with his present time, he imagines societal, educational, religious, and linguistic changes 170 years into his future. He establishes rigid linearity between past, present, and future so that every event is causally and temporally linked to others preceding and succeeding it. Wells attempts realism in fiction and succeeds to the extent that critics discuss the accuracy of his predictions and his shortcomings as a political prophet.

Structurally and, arguably, stylistically, Borges' text 1940 Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius echoes that of H.G. Wells. The story begins in our own world in Borges' present day. In an anachronistic postscript dated seven years in the future, Borges recounts the manner in which the imaginary, man-devised planet Tlön has begun to merge with his own contemporary reality, depicting a vision of the future as Wells did. While the structure is preserved, however, the degree of Utopian realization has changed. The alternate universe of Tlön emerges as the secret collaborative creative encyclopedia Orbis Tertius, rather than a revisionary social plan: "A secret and benevolent society arose to invent a country…. After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses, it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work." Orbis Tertius, a two hundred year-long project, lacks the immediacy and the urgency that Wells' work has. Indeed, whereas for Wells causality was a painstaking necessity, in Tlon causality is obsolete. The inherent subjectivity of existence in Tlon is demonstrated by the coin anecdote, in which a coin does not necessarily exist at a given moment in time unless it is perceived by a conscious being. The existence of a thing at one point in time no longer necessitates its existence in the next. The inhabitants of Tlon, Borges' narrator says, "do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas." Human subjectivity is the decreer of reality in Tlon. 

In much the same way that in Tlon there is no causal link between successive moments, there is no persuasive causal link between the world of Tlon and Borges' contemporary world, a link which is necessary for the formation of a Utopian program and practice from a mere Utopian impulse. The emphasis of Borges' story, then, is not realism as it was for Wells (and certainly for Lenin and Hitler) but rather, much as it was for Marinetti, artistry, creativity and the subjective individual. In envisioning the alternative reality, Borges uses dreamlike, wishful language. In his world, there are no longer object-nouns as they exist in our languages: "There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep." This rhetoric is evocative more of Marinetti's flying angels and "birth of the centaur" than of Well's rigorous, systematic vision of the future. Borges does flirt with the idea of Utopian practice, when he mentions the "imaginary community of Rosae Crucis - a community that others founded later, in imitation of what … had [been] prefigured." But he himself does not approach the Utopian with the same practical agenda. Instead, reality seems to passively, inexplicably merge with the dream world, vaguely impelled by the will of men. As Borges says, "reality yielded" to fantasy. 

Although Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius constitutes a regression on the scale of Utopian realism back to the level of impulse, it is a text very much different from the pre-Modernist Futurist Manifesto. The distinction is one of focus. Whereas programs such as The Shape of Things to Come and practices such as Nazism, communism, and socialism are society-centric (as demonstrated perhaps most poignantly by the elimination of individuals who were inconsistent with the spirit of their respective doctrines), in Borges' text there is a clear shift to an emphasis on the individual as a subjective being. "It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it…The men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes…" This centrality of the individual is further demonstrated in the collaborative and creative aspect of the imagination of Tlon, as well as the new temporality of Tlon discussed above, in which men are the inducers of reality.

Borges' text in its worship of the subjective and its rejection of causal reality contains presentiments of the end of the Utopian practice, marked in reality by the downfall of Nazi Germany. Idealism has gradually ceased to be found in grand societal constructs and has become individualized. As Jameson points out, there is an increasing obsession in our contemporary society in immortality, and improvement of the physical being, and a conviction of individual power. Pharmaceutical and medical conglomerates thrive on popular interest in age-defying face crèmes and gravity-defying augmentation. Millions gladly accepted the doctrine of positive thinking proposed in Rhonda Byrne's viral novel The Secret as an absolute universal law. While societal Utopianism has recently retreated from practice to impulse, then, it has not become extinct: the Utopian has simply transmutated from a guiding principle of the socio-political to a propeller of the individual corporeal.

Image by Jason Blackeye