The Zax Bypass

This article was originally written in October 1997. I really liked it and always wanted to publish it. Ta-da!

Utopias have always been a favourite escape of mine. Whether it is in the future or in the past, from early childhood I have continually searched for a better world to live. Is this escapism? I have reservations about the negative meaning that the word “escapism” has in language. For a prisoner, to escape has always been a good thing and an individual escape can be a first necessary step toward a collective escape. In a sense this is Utopia.

The idea that the utopian element can be gone from contemporary anticipation is of mixed parties. Some may say that Utopia has no place in current political thought and theory, and there are others that would say Utopia belongs only within socialistic paradigms. I am of a different party: I believe the tool of Utopia is vital towards understanding and educating ourselves. I find its specific uses as a literary instrument perplexing and necessary; yet, there exists a trap that I believe many people fall into when reading utopic literature: they read it as a literally specific blueprint of a proposed societal structure and jump to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be feasible. “Prose is bad when people stop to look at it” (Lawrence 1940). When someone reads of a Utopia there seems to be some sense of them that believes they can take the Utopia with them as they close the book. While reading they may be taking part of the spirit of Utopia and even believe in it. But when they close the book and the Utopia doesn’t leave with them, they become disgruntled and disillusioned.

What writers write is either part of, or the whole of the writer; but there is another part that is not theirs. It belongs to the collective of their society. It is with the anonymous work of the milieu that spurs literature. No one is innocent. All we do and say is, and has, an underlying motive. To be aware of these motives is the essential element in beginning to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are — that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.

“Society today demands that the writer raise his voice if he wants to be heard, propose ideas that will have impact on the public, push all his instinctive reactions to extremes. But even the most sensational and explosive statements pass over the heads of readers. All is as nothing, like the sound of the wind. Any comment appears no more than a shake of the head, as at a naughty boy, everyone knows that words are only words, and produce no friction with the world around us: they involve no danger either for the reader or the writer. In the ocean of words, printed or broadcast, the words of the poet or writer are swallowed up” (Calvino 96).

Utopia gives a voice to those aware that freedom implies a society on the move, in which a lot of things are changing (for better or worse;) in this case, too, what is in question is the relationship between the message of Utopia and society, or, between the message and the possible creation of a society to receive it. Utopia is one of society’s instruments of self-awareness —not the only one, but nonetheless an essential instrument, because its origins are connected with the origins of various types of human emotions.

“I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world” (Havel 22).

When in the course of human events there comes a point where the sacrifices of one outweigh that of another, there is injustice on a grand scale. Suffering is equal to despair and where there is despair there is hope. Hope is a human condition that leads to ambition The challenge is take these hopes and desires and transform them into vehicles that can transcend the blockades of our limits. When the blockades are structural constructs of political factions the soul can lose hope quickly. In writing his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Walter Benjamin revealed the purpose of hope: “It is for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us” (Quoted in Bronner 131).

Utopia is often cited as an impractical and useless way of thinking, however Utopia in the past has been favoured rather than the more practical forces that failed before them. The Reformation and the end of the French Revolutionary War are two examples of times past when Utopia sat upon fertile ground (Calvino 246). But what has become of Utopia now? Calvino believes that, “Utopia defies time by setting itself up in a no-place, rejecting relationships with the ‘other’ world…” (Calvino 247) This may be the case however it does not defy change or redefinition.

Murray Bookchin shouts out in The Ecology of Freedom, “The Republic is not a Utopia.” He is referring to Plato’s Republic. He believes that it does not fit with what his view of Utopia is: “a vision of a communist society, or in any sense of the term a democracy.” (Bookchin 1991) Had the word and concept of Utopia been coined before Sir Tomas Moore and during Socrates existence existed, I’m sure as well that Plato, through the tongue of Socrates, would stress that his society was indeed an ideal societal structure, yet not utopic. In order for this idea to stand, Utopia must be understood as a rational approach to formulating visions of understanding our potentiality. Rational versus realistic introduces the question, “What is realistic and what is Utopian?” (Bookchin 1991) When one introduces their ideals on society, their individualistic and/or altruistic ideals, and lays them down with the title Utopia, it is assumed their idealism is rationalistic.

The society of Plato’s republic falls into three distinct divisions: statesman, general civilian and the executive force. These are the natural divisions found in any society, generally. It is hierarchical and dominating. Without these three qualities, according to Bookchin, there can be no order.

“I love order. It’s my dream. a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust…I’m doing my best to create a little order” (Clov in Beckett 57).

What the world is like and what we would prefer the world to be like has a very careful line in between. The ideals of past leaders and their dreams have consistently gone against the ideals of the collectives. For instance, Genghis Khan wanted his empire all for the sake of his people. This was his interest and turned into his necessity. His ideal society, his Utopia could not have attained the potential that it did without this logic.

“Just as King Midas transformed everything he touched into gold, so consciousness is itself determined to transform into the imaginary everything it gets hold of: hence the fatal nature of the dream…the odyssey of consciousness dedicated by itself, and in spite of itself, to build only an unreal world” (Sartre 1972).

Italo Calvino has some beliefs of the politically right and wrong uses of literature. Using his argument and Utopia being a sub-product of literature, I see the same relation with the use of Utopia; specifically that there are two wrong ways of a possible political use for Utopia. The first is to claim that Utopia should voice a truth already possessed by politics; to believe that the sum of political values is the primary thing, to which Utopia must simply adapt itself. This opinion implies a notion of Utopia as pretentious and redundant, but it also implies a notion of politics as fixed and self-confident: an idea that would be disastrous. This would lead to bad Utopia and bad politics.

The other mistaken way is to see Utopia as an assortment of eternal human feelings, as the truth of a human language that politics tends to overlook, and that therefore has to be brought up from time to time. This concept leaves more room for Utopia, but in practice it assigns it the task of confirming what is already known, or maybe of provoking in a basic way, by means of the youthful pleasures of freshness and spontaneity. Behind this way of thinking is the notion of a set of established values that Utopia is responsible for preserving, a classical and permanent idea of Utopia as the library of a given truth. If it agrees to take on the role, Utopia confines itself to a function of consolation, preservation, and regression — a function that could do more harm than good.

The ultimate ethical goal of human life is utopia, that is, a world in which meaning and life are once more indivisible, in which man and the world are at one. (Jameson 173.)

Just as there are two wrong political uses, there are also two right ones.

Utopia is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude. I mean aspects, situations, and languages both of the outer and of the inner world, the tendencies repressed both in individuals and in society. “Utopia is like an ear that can hear things beyond the understanding of the language of politics; it is like an eye that can see beyond the colour spectrum perceived by politics. Simply because of the solitary individualism of his work, the writer may happen to explore areas that no one has explored before, within himself or outside, and to make discoveries that sooner or later turn out to be vital areas of collective awareness.” (Calvino 246)

This is still a very indirect use for Utopia. The writer follows his own road and chance or social and psychological factors lead him to discover something that may become important for political and social action as well. It is the responsibility of the socio-political observer not to leave anything to chance and to apply his own method to the business of Utopia in such a way as not to allow anything to escape him.

Now indeed that nostalgic vision of some golden age in which an epic wholeness was still possible gives place to a view of history which sees men as already implicitly reconciled to the world around them, in the sense in which that world is itself necessarily the result of human labour and human action. (Jameson 190)

Utopia remains. Only, with Benjamin, it is a potential yet a physically unattainable condition ripped from any connection with progress. And that is because progress does not simply extend into the future, but depends upon the manner in which the past is appropriated. I offer Benjamin’s Angel Analogy as a metaphor:

“Shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating . . . His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin 258).

By this example, history and the continual appearance of barbarianism is to blame for the regression of society. Shouldn’t this give Utopia a solid foundation of validity? It is only from the past and the presence of today that allows for Utopia to be used.

Every element of the past becomes open to redemption on the Day of Judgement. “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgement day.” (Benjamin 254)

A theological notion of remembrance contests the perversion of history by totalitarianism. It becomes the only way to deal with that “single catastrophe” on which one gulag after another “keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” (Benjamin 257)

Neither transforming the political judgement into one of utopian possibility merely an evasion, nor is Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image sufficient; indeed, if reference to the struggle is insufficient for evaluating the techniques employed in the work, the use of those same techniques will not depend upon a particular political insight into social reality.

“Suicide is the achievement of modernity in the field of passions.”

Walter Benjamin

WORKS CITED

“A standard to which I may look and by which I may measure actions.”

Plato

• Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1985.
• Bookchin, Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. New York: Black Rose Books, 1991
• Bronner, Stephen Eric. Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
• Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Syracuse University Press: Syracuse NY, 1996.
• Calvino, Italo. The Uses Of Literature: Essays. Translated by Patrick Creagh. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
• Havel, Václav. “From a New Year’s Day Speech.” New York Review of Books, February 15 1990:
• Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton University Press: Princeton NJ, 1971.
• Lawrence, T E. Men in Print: Essays in Literary Criticism. Golden Cockerel Press, 1940.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology of Imagination, Section IV. New York: Citadel Press, 1972.