Category Archives: New Utopia

The first 100 days of Donald J Trumps presidency have had few tangible results and many notable setbackscourt blocked travel bans, the failed attempt at Obamacare repeal and replace, a stalled tax reform effort. These politically significant events, however, quickly disappear under the bright lights of Trumps presidential life, which is thick with the daily drama of a television soap opera.

Is Steve Bannon in or out?

Where is Kellyanne Conway? Has she become an alternative fact?

Will the disgraced Michael Flynn spill the beans on Trump and Russia?

Will Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka, the presidents oldest daughter, continue to contribute to unparalleled White House nepotism? Lest we forget, Jared is charged with resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as well as the total reformation of the federal bureaucracy. For her part, Ivanka will make life better for American women, a role that didnt prevent her from sealing a lucrative Chinese trademark deal during the Chinese Presidents state visit to Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate.

Will Donald Trump continue to violate the emoluments clause of the US Constitution?

Will he ever make his tax returns public?

All of these antics, of course, create a smokescreen that obscures the important stuff going on backstage--the deconstruction of the federal government. As we all know by now, President Trump has appointed cabinet secretaries most of whom are bent on dismantling their departments. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency doesnt believe in the science of climate change. Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, is an opponent of public education. Whats more, many important sub-cabinet positions remain unfilled, which depletes the power and expertise of government departments. This move is a clever way to deconstruct government.

Its pretty clear that Donald Trump wants to govern in the same manner he would undertake a real estate development project. In real estate development there are two ways to move forward on a project: (1) raze the existing structure and replace it with something that is entirely new; or (2) keep the existing structure but gut it from the inside and replace it with revolutionary interiors. For anthropologists like me this strategy bears a curious resemblance to what we call millenarian movements. In his classic book, anthropologist Peter Worsley surveyed the characteristics of these movements in Melanesia. Sometimes called cargo cults, millenarian movements, which are both religious and political in character, have occurred past and present and in every corner of the world. In millenarian movements, the oppressive hell of the old order compels a prophet to predict a cataclysmic event that will end the world. When the end comes the structure of the old order is razed like an old building. When the apocalypse arrives, everyone dies except for the prophet and his true-believer followers who inherit the world and build a new utopian society that conforms to the movements worldview. Such was the rationale for the American Indian Ghost dances of the 19th Century. Such was the rationale for David Koreshs Branch Davidian movement and for Jim Joness Peoples Temple. Such is the reasoning of millions of Americans who believe that end of the world as we know it is close at hand.

There are countless End Times churches in the US. Indeed, the depth and breadth of End Times belief is reflected in the ongoing popularity of the Left Behind book series. Written by the late Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins the Left Behind Series consists of 10 novels about the End Timesthe onset of the apocalypse, the rapture in which true believers are saved and the second coming of Christ who will build a new kingdom of believers. These books have sold upwards of 65 million copies.

Sensing similarit of belief and practice, End Times believers seem to like Donald Trumps destroy and rebuild approach to governing. Many of them see his ascendancy to The White House as a sign that the End Times are near. Consider what Pro-Trump pastor Lance Wallnau said about candidate Trump in a conversation with the televangelist Jim Baaker.

Consider this January 3, 2017 statement from the End Times Ministries:

Consider what Nelle Smith said in a University of Southern California Religion Dispatch (Janaury 31, 2017)

If you tear down the structure of government, you prepare the world for the End Times and the emergence of the Kingdom of Believers. These are classic millenarian beliefs, which is why so many evangelicals think that Donald Trump is paving the way for a new God-fearing utopia.

Heres the rub: beyond the predictions for the apocalypse, the expectation for the rapture and the long-desired emergence of new world, millenarian movements dont end well. The prophecies never seem to pan out.The prophets, who like to ask for donations, are often morally bankrupt. As for the movements themselves, they literally burn out, precipitating much bad feeling, widespread injury and needless destruction, all of which makes me wonder if our End Times President, like the millenarian prophet, will slash and burn his way to oblivion.

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End Times President - Huffington Post

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Today we are people who know better, and thats both a wonderful and terrible thing.

Sam Green, Utopia in Four Movements,

Utopia is a hard sell in the twenty-first century. Today we are people who know better, and what we know are the horrors of actually existing Utopias of the previous century: Nazi Germany, Stalins Soviet Union, Maoist China, and so on in depressing repetition. In each case there was a radical break with the present and a bold leap toward an imagined future; in every case the result was disastrous in terms of human cost. Thankfully, what seems to be equally consistent is that these Utopias were relatively short-lived. History, therefore, appears to prove two things: one, Utopias, once politically realized, are staggering in their brutality; and two, they are destined to fail. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Yet we need Utopia more than ever. We live in a time without alternatives, at the end of history as Frances Fukuyama would have it, when neoliberal capitalism reins triumphant and uncontested. There are still aberrations: radical Islam in the East, neo-fascist xenophobia in the West, and a smattering of socialist societies struggling around the globe, but by and large the only game in town is the global free market. In itself this might not be so bad, except for the increasingly obvious fact that the system is not working, not for most people and not most of the time. Income inequality has increased dramatically both between and within nations. National autonomy has become subservient to the imperatives of global economic institutions, and federal, state, and local governance are undermined by the protected power of money. Profit-driven industrialization and the headlong rush toward universal consumerism is hastening the ecological destruction of the planet. In short: the world is a mess. Opinion polls, street protests, and volatile voting patterns demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, but the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! No to dictators, No to corruption, No to finance capital, No to the one percent who control everything. But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system dominates not because people agree with it; it rules because we are convinced there is no alternative.

Utopia offers us a glimpse of an alternative. Utopia, broadly conceived, is an image of a world not yet in existence that is different from and better than the world we inhabit now. For the revolutionary, Utopia offers a goal to reach and a vision to be realized. For the reformer, it provides a compass point to determine what direction to move toward and a measuring stick to determine how far one has come. Utopia is politically necessary even for those who do not desire an alternative society at all. Thoughtful politics depend upon debate and without someone or something to disagree with there is no meaningful dialogue, only an echo chamber. Utopia offers this other, an interlocutor with which to argue, thereby clarifying and strengthening your own ideas and ideals (even if they lead to the conclusion that Utopia is undesirable). Without a vision of an alternative future, we can only look backwards nostalgically to the past, or unthinkingly maintain what we have, mired in the unholy apocalypse that is now. Politically, we need Utopia.

Yet there are theoretical as well as practical problems with the project. Even before the disastrous realizations of Utopia in the twentieth century, the notion of an idealized society was attacked by both radicals and conservatives. From the Left, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously criticized Utopians for ignoring the material conditions of the present in favor of fantasies of a futurean approach, in their estimation, that was bound to result in ungrounded and ineffectual political programs, a reactionary retreat to an idealized past, and to inevitable failure and political disenchantment. Ultimately, they wrote in The Communist Manifesto, when stubborn facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of socialism end[s] in a miserable fit of the blues. That is to say, the high of Utopia leads, inevitably, to the crushing low of a hangover. From the Right, Edmund Burke disparaged the Utopianism of the French Revolution for refusing to take into account the realities of human nature and the accumulated wisdom of long-seated traditions. With some justification, Burke felt that such leaps into the unknown could only lead to chaos and barbarism. Diametrically opposed in nearly every other facet of political ideology, these lions of the Left and Right could agree on one thing: Utopia was a bad idea.

Between the two poles of the political spectrum, for those in the center who simply hold on to the ideal of democracy, Utopia can also be problematic. Democracy is a system in which ordinary people determine, directly or through representation, the system that governs the society they live within. Utopias, however, are usually the products of singular imaginations or, at best, the plans of a small group: a political vanguard or artistic avant-garde. Utopians too often consider people as organic material to be shaped, not as willful agents who do the shaping; the role of the populace is, at best, to conform to a plan of a world already delivered complete. Considered a different way, Utopia is a closed program in which action is circumscribed by an algorithm coded by the master programmer. In this program there is no space for the citizen hacker. This is one reason why large-scale Utopias, made manifest, are so horrific and short-lived: short-lived because people tend not to be so pliable, and therefore insist on upsetting the perfect plans for living; horrific because people are made pliable and forced to fit the plans made for them. In Utopia the demos is designed, not consulted.

It is precisely the imaginative quality of Utopiathat is, the singular dream of a phantasmagorical alternativethat seems to damn the project to nave impracticality as an ideal and megalomaniac brutality in its realization. But without political illusions, with what are we left? Disillusion, and its attendant discursive practice: criticism. Earnest, ironic, sly or bombastic; analytic, artistic, textual, or performative; criticism has become the predominant political practice of intellectuals, artists, and even activists who are dissatisfied with the world of the present, and ostensibly desire something new. Criticism is also Utopias antithesis. If Utopianism is the act of imagining what is new, criticism, derived from the Greek words kritikos (to judge) and perhaps more revealing, krinein (to separate or divide), is the practice of pulling apart, examining, and judging that which already exists.

One of the political advantages of criticismand one of the reasons why it has become the preferred mode of political discourse in the wake of twentieth-century Utopian totalitarianismis that it guards against the monstrous horrors of political idealism put into practice. If Utopianism is about sweeping plans, criticism is about pointed objections. The act of criticism continually undermines any attempt to project a perfect system. Indeed, the very act of criticism is a strike against perfection: implicitly, it insists that there is always more to be done. Criticism also asks for input from others. It presupposes a dialogue between the critic and who or what they are criticizingor,ideally, a conversation amongst many people, each with their own opinion. And because the need to criticize is never-ending (one can always criticize the criticism itself), politics remains fluid and open: a permanent revolution. This idea and ideal of an endless critical conversation is at the center of democratic politics, for once the conversation stops we are left with a monolithic ideal, and the only politics that is left is policing: ensuring obedience and drawing the lines between those who are part of the brave new world and those who are not. This policing is the essence of totalitarianism, and over the last century the good fight against systems of oppression, be they fascist, communist or capitalist, has been waged with ruthless criticism.

But criticism has run its political course. What was once a potent weapon against totalitarianism has become an empty ritual, ineffectual at best and self-delusional at worst. What happened? History. The power of criticism is based on two assumptions: first, that there is an intrinsic power and worth in knowing or revealing the Truth; and second, that in order to reveal the Truth, beliefoften based in superstition, propaganda, and liesmust be debunked. Both these assumptions, however, have been undermined by recent material and ideological changes.

The idea that there is a power in knowing the Truth is an old one. As the Bible tells us in the Gospel of John (8:31-33) And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. What constituted the truth at that time was hardly the empirical fact of todayit was what we might call the supreme imaginary of the Word of God, communicated through the teachings of Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, these are the seeds of an idea and ideal that knowing the answer to lifes mysteries is an intrinsic good. As I have argued elsewhere, this faith in the power of the Truth is integral to all modern political thought and liberal-democratic politics, but it is given one of its purest popular expressions in Hans Christian Andersons 1837 tale The Emperors New Clothes. The story, as you may recall from your childhood, is about an emperor who is tricked into buying a spectacular suit of non-existent clothing by a pair of charlatans posing as tailors. Eager to show it off, the Emperor parades through town in the buff as the crowd admires his imaginary attire. Then, from the sidelines, a young boy cries out: But he has nothing on, and, upon hearing this undeniable fact, the people whisper it mouth to ear, awaken from their illusion, and live happily ever after. Is this not the primal fantasy of all criticsthat if they just revealed the Truth, the scales will fall from peoples eyes and all will see the world as it really is? (Which, of course, is the world as the critic sees it.)

There was once a certain logic to this faith in the power of the possession of Truthor, through criticism, the revealing of a lie. Within an information economy where there is a scarcity of knowledge, and often a monopoly on its production and distribution, knowledge does equal power. To criticize the official Truth was to strike a blow at the church or states monopoly over meaning. Critique was a decidedly political act, and the amount of effort spent by church and state in acts of censorship suggests its political efficacy. But we do not exist in this world anymore. We live in what philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard named the postmodern condition, marked by the death of the master narrative in which Truth (or the not so Noble Lie) no longer speaks in one voice or resides in one location.

The postmodern condition, once merely an academic hypothesis pondered by an intellectual elite, is now, in the Internet age, the lived experience of the multitude. On any social or political issue there are hundreds, thousands and even millions of truths being claimed. There are currently 1 trillion unique URLs on the World Wide Web, accessed by 2 billion Google searches a day. There are more than 70 million videos posted on YouTube, and about 30 billion tweets have been sent. The worldwide count of blogs alone exceeds 130 million, each with a personalized perspective and most making idiosyncratic claims. Even the great modern gatekeepers of the TruthBBC, CNN and other objective news outletshave been forced to include user-generated content and comment boards on their sites, with the result that no singular fact or opinion stands alone or remains unchallenged.

It was the great Enlightenment invention of the Encyclopedia that democratized Truthbut only in relation to its reception. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with its 3.5 million-and-counting entries in English alone has democratized the production of truths. This process is not something hidden, but part of the presentation itself. Each Wikipedia page is headed by a series of tabs that, when clicked, display the encyclopedia entry, public discussion about the definition provided, the history of the entrys production, and a final tab: edit this page, where a reader has the chance to become a (co)producer of knowledge by editing and rewriting the original entry. In Wikipedia the Truth is transformed from something that is into something that is becoming: built, transformed, and revised; never stable and always fluid: truth with a small t.

Todays informational economy is no longer one of monopoly or scarcityit is an abundance of truthand of critique. When power is wielded through a monopoly on Truth, then a critical assault makes a certain political sense, but singularity has now been replaced by plurality. There is no longer a communications citadel to be attacked and silenced, only an endless plain of chatter, and the idea of criticizing a solitary Truth, or swapping one for the otherthe Emperor wears clothes/the Emperor wears no clotheshas become increasingly meaningless. As the objects of criticism multiply, criticisms power and effect directly diminishes.

Criticism is also contingent upon belief. We often think of belief as that which is immune to critique. It is the individual or group that is absolutely confidentreligious fundamentalists in todays world, or totalitarian communists or fascists of the last century; that is, those who possess what we call blind belief, which criticism can not touch. This is not so, for it is only for those who truly believe that criticism still matters. Criticism threatens to undermine the very foundation of existence for those who build their lives on the edifice of belief. To question, and thus entertain doubt, undermines the certainty necessary for thoroughgoing belief. This is why those with such fervent beliefs are so hell-bent on suppressing their critics.

But can one say, in most of the world today, that anyone consciously believes in the system? Look, for instance, at the citizens of the United States and their opinions about their economic system. In 2009, the major US pollster Rasmussen Reports stated that only a marginal majority of Americans 53 percent believe that capitalism is a better system than Socialism. This finding was mirrored by a poll conducted a year later by the widely respected Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in which only 52 percent of Americans expressed a favorable opinion of capitalism. Just a reminder: these polls were taken after the fall of the Soviet Union and the capitalist transformation of China, in a country with no anti-capitalist party, where the mass media lauds the free market and suggests no alternatives, and where anti-communism was raised to an art form. This lack of faith in the dominant system of capitalism is mirrored worldwide. A BBC World Service poll, also from 2009, found that across twenty-seven (capitalist) countries, only 11 percent of the public thought free-market capitalism was working well. Asked if they thought that capitalism is fatally flawed and a different economic system is needed, 23 percent of the 29,000 people surveyed answered in the affirmative, with the proportion of discontents growing to 35 percent in Brazil, 38 percent in Mexico and 43 percent in France.

My anti-capitalist friends are thrilled with these reports. Surely were waiting for the Great Leap Forward. I hate to remind them, however, that if the system is firmly in control, it no longer needs belief: it functions on routineand the absence of imagination. That is to say, when ideology becomes truly hegemonic, you no longer need to believe. The reigning ideology is everything: the sun, the moon, the stars; there is simply nothing outsideno alternativeto imagine. Citizens no longer need to believe in or desire capitalism in order to go along with it, and dissatisfaction with the system, as long as it is leveled as a critique of the system rather than providing an alternative, matters little. Indeed, criticism of neoliberal capitalism is a part of the system itselfnot as healthy check on power as many critics might like to believe, but as a demonstration of the sort of plurality necessary in a democratic age for complete hegemonic control.

I am reminded of the massive protests that flooded the streets before the US invasion of Iraq. On February 15, 2003 more than a million people marched in New York City, while nearly 10 million demonstrated worldwide. What was the response of then president George W. Bush? He calmly and publicly acknowledged the mass demonstration as a sign that the system was working, saying, Democracys a beautiful thing people are allowed to express their opinion, and I welcome peoples right to say what they believe. This was spin and reframing, but it got at a fundamental truth. Bush needed the protest to make his case for a war of (Western) freedom and liberty vesus (Arab) repression and intolerance. Ironically, he also needed the protest to legitimize the war itself. In the modern imagination real wars always have dissent; now that Bush had a protest he had a genuine war. Although it pains me to admit this, especially as I helped organize the demonstration in New York, anti-war protest and critique has become an integral part of war.

When a system no longer needs to base its legitimacy on the conscious belief of its subjects indeed, no longer has to legitimize itself at allthe critical move to debunk belief by revealing it as something based on lies no longer retains its intended political effect. This perspective is not universally recognized, as is confirmed by a quick perusal of oppositional periodicals, be they liberal or conservative. In each venue there will be criticisms of official truth and the positing of counter-truths. In each there exist a thousand young boys yelling out: But he has no clothes! To no avail. The de-bunking of belief may continue for eternity as a tired and impotent ritual of political subjectivitysomething to make us think and feel as if we are really challenging powerbut its importance and efficacy is nil.

Dystopia, Utopias doppelganger, speaks directly to the crisis in belief, for dystopias conjure up a world in which no one wants to believe. Like Utopias, dystopias are an image of an alternative world, but here the similarities end. Dystopian imaginaries, while positing a scenario set in the future, always return to the present with a critical impulsesuggesting what must be curtailed if the world is not to end up the way it is portrayed. Dystopia is therefore less an imagination of what might be than a revealing of the hidden logic of what already is. Confronted with a vision of our horrific future, dystopias audience is supposed to see the Truththat our present course is leading us to the rocks of disasterand, having woken up, now act. Dystopic faith in revelation and the power of the (hidden) truth makes common cause with traditional criticism and suffers the same liabilities.

Furthermore, the political response generated by dystopia is always is a conservative one: stop the so-called progress of civilization in its course and and what? Where do we go from here? We do not know because we have neither been offered a vision of a world to hope for nor encouraged to believe that things could get better. In this way dystopias, even as they are often products of fertile imagination, deter imagination in others. The two options presented to the audience are either to accept the dystopic future as it is represented, or turn back to the present and keep this future from happening. In neither case is there a place for imagining a desirable alternative.

Finally, the desire encouraged through dystopic spectatorship is perverse. We seem to derive great satisfaction from vicariously experiencing our world destroyed by totalitarian politics, rapacious capitalism, runaway technology or ecological disaster, and dystopic scenarios1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner, The Day After Tomorrow, The Matrix, 2012have proved far more popular in our times than any comparable Utopic text. Contemplating the haunting beauty of dystopic art, like Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Joness recent London Futures show at the Museum of London in which the capital of England lies serenely under seven meters of water, brings to mind the famous phrase of Walter Benjamin, that our self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.While such dystopic visions are, no doubt, sincerely created to instigate collective action, I suspect what they really inspire is a sort of solitary satisfaction in hopelessness. In recent years a new word has entered our vocabulary to describe this very effect: disasterbation.

So here we are, stuck between the Devil and the deep blue sea, with a decision to make. Either we drift about, leveling critiques with no critical effect and reveling in images of our impending destructionliving a life of political bad faith as we desire to make a difference yet dontor we approach the Devil. It is not much of a choice. If we want to change the world we need to abandon the political project of pure criticism and strike out in a new direction. That is, we need to make our peace with Utopia. This cannot happen by pretending that Utopias demons do not existcreating a Utopia of Utopia; instead it means candidly acknowledging the problems with Utopia, and then deciding whether the ideal is still salvageable. This revaluation is essential, as it is one thing to conclude that criticism is politically impotent, but quite another to suggest that, in the long shadow of its horrors, we resurrect the project of Utopianism.

Today we are people who know better, and thats both a wonderful and terrible thing. When Sam Green presents this line in his performance of Utopia in Four Movements it is meant as a sort of a lament that our knowledge of Utopias horrors cannot allow us ever again to have such grand dreams. This knowledge is wonderful in that there will be no large-scale atrocities in the name of idealism; it is terrible in that we no longer have the capacity to envision an alternative. But we neednt be so pessimistic; perhaps knowing better offers us a perspective from which we can re-examine and re-approach the idea and ideal of Utopia. Knowing better allows us to ask questions that are essential if Utopia is to be a viable political project.

The paramount question, I believe, is whether or not Utopia can be opened upto criticism, to participation, to modification, and to re-creation. It is only a Utopia like this that will be resistant to the ills that have plagued the project: its elite envisioning, its single-minded execution, and its unyielding manifestation. An Open Utopia that is democratic in its conception and protean in its realization gives us a chance to escape the nightmare of history and start imagining anew.

Another question must also be addressed: How is Utopia to come about? Utopia as a philosophical ideal or a literary text entails no input other than that of its author, and no commitment other than time and interest on the part of its readers; but Utopia as the basis of an alternative society requires the participation of its population. In the past people were forced to accept plans for an alternative society, but this is the past we are trying to escape. If we reject the anti-democratic, politics-from-above model that has haunted past Utopias, can the public be persuaded to ponder such radical alternatives themselves? In short, now that we are people who know better, can we be convinced to give Utopia another chance?

These are vexing questions. Their answers, however, have been there all along, from the very beginning, in Thomas Mores Utopia.

When More wrote Utopia in the early sixteenth century he was not the first writer to have imagined a better world. The author owed a heavy literary debt to Platos Republic wherein Socrates lays out his blueprint for a just society. But he was also influenced by the political and social imaginings of classic authors like Plutarch, Sallust, Tacitus, Cicero and Seneca, with all of whom an erudite Renaissance Humanist like More would have been on intimate terms. The ideal of a far-off land operating according to foreign, and often alluring, principles was also a stock-in-trade in the tales of travel popular at the time. The travelogues of Sir John Mandeville were bestsellers (albeit amongst a limited literate class) in the fourteenth century, and adventurers tales, like those of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century explorer Amerigo Vespucci, were familiar to More. Most important, the Biblethe master-text of Mores European homeprovided images of mythical-historical lands flowing with milk and honey, and glimpses of a world beyond where the lion lays down with the lamb.

By the time More sat down to write his book, envisioning alternative worlds was a well-worn literary tradition, nut Utopia literally named the practice. One need not have read his book, nor even know that such a book exists, to be familiar with the word, and Utopia has entered the popular lexicon to represent almost any positive ideal of a society. But, given how commonly the word is used and how widely it is applied, Utopia is an exceedingly curious book, and much less straightforward than one might think.

Utopia is actually two books, written separately and published together in 1516 (along with a great deal of ancillary material: maps, marginalia, and dedications contributed by members of the Renaissance Europes literary establishment). Book I is the story of More meeting and entering into a discussion with the traveler Raphael Hythloday; Book II is Hythlodays description of the land to which he has traveledthe Isle of Utopia. Scholars disagree about exactly how much of Book I was in Mores mind when he wrote Book II, but all agree that Book II was written first in 1515 while the author was waiting around on a futile diplomatic mission in the Netherlands, and Book I was written a year later in his home in London. Chronology of creation aside, the reader of Utopia encounters Book I before Book II, so this is how we too shall start.

Book I of Utopia opens with More introducing himself as a character and taking on the role of narrator. He tells the reader that he has been sent to Flanders on a diplomatic mission for the king of England, and introduces us to his friend Peter Giles, who is living in Antwerp. All this is based in fact: More was sent on such a mission by Henry VIII in 1515 and Peter Giles, in addition to being the authors friend, was a well-known Flemish literary figure. Soon, however, More mixes fiction into his facts by describing a meeting with Raphael Hythloday, a stranger, who seemed past the flower of his age; his face was tanned, he had a long beard, and his cloak was hanging carelessly about him, so that, by his looks and habit, I concluded he was a seaman. While the description is vivid and matter-of-fact, there are hints that this might not be the type of voyager who solely navigates the material plane. Giles explains to More that Hythloday has not sailed as a seaman, but as a traveler, or rather a philosopher. Yet it is revealed a few lines later that the (fictional) traveler has been in the company of the (factual) explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose party he left to venture off and discover the (fictional) Island of Utopia. This promiscuous mix of reality and fantasy sets the tone for Utopia. From the beginning we, the readers, are thrown off balance: Who and what should we take seriously?

Returning to the story: introductions are made, and the three men strike up a conversation. The discussion turns to Mores native country, and Hythloday describes a (fictional) dinner conversation at the home of (the factual) John Morton, Catholic Cardinal, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Chancellor of England, on the harsh laws of England which, at the time, condemned persons to death for the most minor of crimes. At the dinner party Hythloday assumes the role of critic, arguing against such laws in particular and the death penalty in general. He begins by insisting that crime must be understood and addressed at a societal level. Inheritance laws, for instance, leave all heirs but the first son property-less, and thus financially desperate. Standing armies and frequent wars result in the presence of violent and restless soldiers, who move easily into crime; and the enclosure of once common lands forces commoners to criminal measures to supplement their livelihood. Hythloday then finds a fault in juridical logic. Enforcing the death penalty for minor crimes, he points out, only encourages major ones, as the petty thief might as well kill their victim as have them survive as a possible witness. Turning his attention upward, Hythloday then claims that capital punishment is hubris against the Divine, for only God has the right to take a human life. Having thus argued for a sense of justice grounded on earth as well as in the heavens, he concludes: If you do not find a remedy to these evils it is a vain thing to boast of the severity in punishing theft, which, though it might have the appearance of justice, yet in itself is neither just nor convenient. It is a blistering critique and a persuasive performance.

The crowd around the archbishops dinner table, however, is not persuaded. A lawyer present immediately replies with a pedantic non-reply that merely sums up Hythlodays arguments. A fool makes a foolish suggestion, trolling only for laughs. And a Friar, the butt of the fools jokes, becomes indignant and begins quoting scripture willy-nilly to justify his outrage, engaging in tit-for-tat with the fool and thus derailing the discussion entirely. The only person Hythloday seems to reach is Morton, who adds his own ideas about the proper treatment of vagabonds. But this thoughtful contribution, too, is devalued when the company assembledmotivated not by logic but by sycophancyslavishly agree with the archbishop. As a Socratic dialogue, a model More no doubt had in mind, the dinner party discussion bombs. Hythloday convinces no one with his logic, fails to engage all but one of his interlocutors, and moves us no closer to the Platonic ideal of Justice. In short, Hythloday, as a critic, is ineffectual.

And not for the only time. Hythloday makes another critical intervention later in Book I, this time making his case directly to More and Giles. Here the topic is private property, which Hythloday believes to be at the root of all societys ills, crime included. I must freely own, he reasons, that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily Alas, while Hythloday has convinced himself, he is the only one, for there are no ears for his thoughts. More immediately counters with the oft-heard argument that without property to gain and inequality as a spur, humans will become lazy, and Giles responds with a proto-Burkean defense of tradition. Again, Hythlodays attempts at critical persuasion fail.

Hythloday concludes that critical engagement is pointless. And when More suggests that he, with his broad experience and strong opinions, become a court counselor, Hythloday dismisses the idea. Europeans, he argues, are resistant to new ideas. Princes are deaf to philosophy and are more concerned with making war than hearing ideals for peace. And courts are filled with men who admire only their own ideas and are envious of others. More, himself unconvinced by Hythloday up until now, finally agrees with him. One is never to offer propositions or advice that we are certain will not be entertained, he concurs, adding that, Discourses so much out of the road could not avail anything, nor have any effect on men whose minds were prepossessed with different sentiments.

But More does not counsel despair and disengagementhe suggests an alternative strategy of persuasion. The problem is not with Hythlodays arguments themselves, but with the form in which he presents them. One cannot simply present radical ideas that challenge peoples basic assumptions about the world in the form of a reasoned argument, for no one wants to be told they are wrong. There is another philosophy, More explains, that is more pliable, that knows its proper scene, [and] accommodates itself to it. He goes on to use the example of drama, explaining how an actor must adapt to the language and the setting of the play if his lines are to make sense to the audience. If the drama is a light comedy, More explains, then it makes little sense to play ones part as if it were a serious tragedy, For you spoil and corrupt the play that is in hand when you mix with it things of an opposite nature, even though they are much better. Therefore, he continues, go through the play that is acting the best you can, and do not confound it because another that is pleasanter comes into your thoughts.

More makes it clear that his dramaturgical advice is meant to be taken politically. He tells Hythloday: You are not obliged to assault people with discourses that are out of their road when you see that their received notions must prevent your making an impression on them. Instead, he counsels, you ought rather to cast about and to manage things with all the dexterity in your power. This time, however, it is Hythlodays turn to be unswayed by argument. He interprets Mores proposal as an invitation to dissemble and rejects it forthwith: as for lying, whether a philosopher can do it or not I cannot tell: I am sure I cannot do it.

This revealing exchange may be understood in several ways. The most common reading among Utopiascholars is that Mores advice to Hythloday is an argument for working within the system, to go through with the play that is acting the best you can, and to abandon a confrontational style of criticism in favor of another philosophy that is more pliable, that knows its proper scene, [and] accommodates itself. To be successful, More seems to counsel, one must cast oneself within the play that is acting, that is, the status quo, and accommodate ones ideas to the dominant discourse. Shortly before writing Utopia, More had been asked by Henry VIII to enter his service as a counselor and he was still contemplating the offer while at work on the book. It is thus easy to imagine this whole discussion as a debate of sorts within his own head. Mores conclusionthat to be effective one needs to put aside the high-minded posturing of the critic and embrace the pliability of politicscan be understood as an early rationalization for his own decision to join the Kings council two years later, in 1518. (A decision that was literally to cost the man his head in 1535, when hehigh-mindedlyrefused to bless Henry VIIIs divorce and split from the Catholic Church). Another popular interpretation of this passage proposes that More is merely trotting out the standard classical arguments in defense of the practice of rhetoric: know your audience, cater to their preferences, and so forth. Hythloday, in turn, gives the classic rebuttal: the Truth is fixed and eternal. It is the debate between Aristotle in the Rhetoric and Plato in Gorgias, retold.

While not discounting either of these interpretations, I want to suggest another: that Morethe character and the authoris making a case for the political futility of direct criticism. What he calls for in its place is a technique of persuasion that circumvents the obstacles that Hythloday describes: tradition, narrow-mindedness, and a simple resistance on the part of the interlocutor to being told what to think. More knows that, while the critic may be correct, their criticism can often fall on deaf earsas it did in all of Hythlodays attempts. What is needed is another model of political discourse; not rhetoric with its moral relativity, nor simply altering ones opinions so they are acceptable to those in power, but something else entirely. Where is this alternative to be found? Answering this question entails taking Mores dramatic metaphor seriously.

The plays the thing. What drama doesis create a counter-world to the here and now. Plays fashion a space and place which can look and feel like reality yet is not beholden to its limitations, it is, literally, a stage on which imagination becomes reality. A successful play, according to the Aristotelian logic with which More would have been familiar, is one in which the audience loses themselves in the drama: its world becomes theirs. The world of the play is experienced and internalized and thus, to a certain degree and for a limited amount of time, naturalized. The alternative becomes the norm. Whereas alternatives presented through criticism are often experienced by the audience as external to the dominant logic, as discourses that are out of their road, the same arguments advanced within the alternative reality of the play become the dominant logic. Importantly, this logic is not merely approached cognitively, as set of abstract precepts, but experienced viscerally, albeit vicariously, as a set of principles put into practice.

What works on the stage might also serve in the stateroom. By presenting views at odds with the norm the critic begins at a disadvantage; he or she is the perpetual outsider, always operating from the margins, trying to convince people that what they know as the Truth might be false, and what they hold to be reality is just one perspective among many. This marginal position not only renders persuasion more difficult but, paradoxically, reinforces the centrality of the norm. The margins, by very definition, are bound to the center, and the critic, in their act of criticism, re-inscribes the importance of the world they take issue with. Compared to the critic, the courtier has an easier time of it. The courtier, as a yes man, operates within the boundaries of accepted reality. They neednt make reasoned appeals to the intellect at all, they merely restate the obvious: what is already felt, known and experienced. The courtier has no interest in offering an alternative or even providing genuine advice; their function is merely to reinforce the status quo.

Casting about, or the indirect approach as it is elsewhere translated, provides More with a third position that transcends critic and courtierone that allows an individual to offer critical advice without being confined to the margins. Instead of countering reality as the critic does, or accepting a reality already given like the courtier, this person creates their own reality. This individuallet us call them an artistconjures up a full-blown lifeworld that operates according to a different axioms. Like Hamlet staging the murder of his father before an audience of the court and the eyes of his treacherous uncle, the artist maneuvers the spectator into a position where they see their world in a new light. The persuasive advantages of this strategy should be obvious. Instead of being the outsider convincing people that what they know to be right is wrong, the artist creates a new context for what is right and lets people experience it for themselves. Instead of negating reality, they create a new one. No longer an outsider, this artist occupies the center stage in their own creation, imagining and then describing a place where their ideals already exist, and then inviting their audience to experience it with them. Book I a damning critique of direct criticismends with this more hopeful hint at an alternative model of persuasion. Book II is Mores demonstration of this technique; his political artistry in practice.

The second book of Utopia begins with Raphael Hythloday taking over the role of narrator and, like the first book, opens with a detailed description of the setting in order to situate the reader. Unlike the real Flanders described by More in Book I, however, the location that Hythloday depicts is a purely imaginary space:

The island of Utopia is in the middle two hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it, but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent. Between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about five hundred miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current; the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbor, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce.

Like the coordinates of the Garden of Edenlocated at the mythical juncture of the real rivers of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and the Euphratesthis description lends a physical veracity to what is a fantasy, a technique that More will employ throughout. After this physical description of the island, Hythloday begins his almost encyclopedic account of the customs and constitution of Utopia. Highlights include: an elected government and priesthood, freedom of speech and religion, public health and education, an economy planned for the good of all, compassionate justice and little crime, and perhaps most Utopian of all, no lawyers: a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters and wrest the laws.

The people who populate Utopia are kind and generous, and shoulder their responsibility for the general welfare as the natural order of things. They always have work, yet also enjoy a great deal of leisure which they spend in discussion, music, or attending public lectures (alas, gambling, beer halls, and wine bars are unknown in Utopia). There is ideological indoctrination, to be sure, but even this is idealized: the Utopians begin each communal meal with a reading on a moral topic, but it is so short that it is not tedious. The various cities of Utopia function in harmony with one another, and if one district has a surplus of crops or other goods, these are redirected towards cities which have a deficit, so that indeed the whole island is, as it were, one family.

At the root of Utopia, the source from which everything grows, is the community of property. The quality of this society is best described thus:

[E]very house has both a door to the street and a back door to the garden. Their doors have all two leaves, which, as they are easily opened, so they shut of their own accord; and, there being no property among them, every man may freely enter into any house whatsoever.

For though no man has any thing, yet they are all rich.

Utopia is Mores sixteenth-century Europe turned upside-down. This inversion of the real is best illustrated in one of the few anecdotes that Hythloday narratesa visit to the island by a group of foreign ambassadors. The Anemolians, as they are called, had never traveled to Utopia before, and were unfamiliar with the local customs. [T]hey, being a vainglorious rather than a wise people, resolved to set themselves out with so much pomp that they should look like gods, and strike the eyes of the poor Utopians with their splendor. Dressed for success, the Anemolian ambassadors wear cloth made from gold and drape heavy gold chains around their necks, while gold rings adorn their fingers and strings of gems and pearls hang from their caps. But in Utopia, Hythloday tells us, such wealth and finery signify differently. Gold is what the chains and shackles of slaves are made from, and jewels are considered childrens playthings: pretty to look at, but valued much as marbles or dolls are by us. Utopians craft their dinnerware from everyday clay and glass, saving their gold and silver to fashion implements for another part of the nutritional process: chamber pots. (O magnificent debasement of gold! is written in the marginalia at this point in the text. ) Ignorant of the Utopians as they are, the Anemolian ambassadors make their public appearance bedecked in their finery. The Utopians, confused, bow to the humblest and most simply dressed of the Anemolian party and ignore the leaders, who they believe to be slaves. In a moment anticipating The Emperors New Clothes, a child, spying the ambassadors, calls out to his mother: See that great fool, that wears pearls and gems as if he were yet a child! To which the mother answers: Hold your peace! This, I believe, is one of the ambassadors fools.

This anecdote, along with the rest of Hythlodays description of Utopia in Book II, does what Hythloday in Book I cannot: it presents the world of the Utopians in such a way that the reader confronts these radical ideas as the norm to which their own world is an aberration. More, through Hythloday, thereby moves the margins into the center, and forces skeptics into the margins; the alternative occupies center stage. In a word, More naturalizes his imagined Utopia.

At various points throughout Book II, Hythloday comments upon the contextuality of the natural. The Utopians share the same days, months and years as the books audience, as these are rooted in physical laws of the universe, but man is a changeable creature, as Hythloday asserts, and the behavior of the Utopians is the result of their societys beliefs and institutions. Indeed, the idea that the social can shape the natural extends even to animals: at one point Hythloday explains how the Utopians use artificial incubation to hatch their chicks, and they are no sooner out of the shell, and able to stir about, but they seem to consider those [humans] that feed them as their mothers, and follow them as other chickens do the hen that hatched them.

If there is little crime in Utopia, it is not because the Utopians are inherently more law-abiding, but because there is a rational criminal justice system at work and no private property to be gained or lost in theft. Hythloday makes the same argument about crime and private property as he does in Book I, but in Book II he is more persuasive (at least, no one interrupts to tell him he is wrong) because he shows the world as it might be instead of telling people what is wrong with the world as it is. Through the imaginative space of Utopia, More has assembled a new context for his readers to approach old, seemingly intractable social problems and imagine new solutions.

But what sort of a space is this? As many know, Utopia is a made-up word composed by More from the Greek words ou (not) and topos (place). It is a space which is, literally, no place. Furthermore, the storyteller of this magic land is named Raphael Hythloday, or Hythlodaeus in the Latin in which More wrote. The root of this surname is the Greek huthlos, a word used frequently by Plato, meaning nonsense or idle talk. So here we are, being told the story of a place which is named out of existence, by a narrator who is named as unreliable. And these are just two of the countless paradoxes, enigmas and jokes scattered throughout the text. And so begins the big debate among Utopia scholars: Is the entirety of Mores Utopia a satire, an exercise demonstrating the absurdity of proposing political, social and economic alternatives to the status quo? Or is this story of an idyllic society an earnest effort to suggest and promote such ideals?

There is suggestive evidence for Mores sincerity. More is at pains to lend a sense of veracity to the story. He very clearly situates it within the context of his ownverifiabletrip to Flanders in 1515, and scatters the names of well-known contemporaries throughout the book: Peter Giles, Archbishop Morton, Amerigo Vespucci, an others. As you will remember, More provides painstakingly detailed descriptions of Utopia, beginning with Hythlodays description of the landscape of the island. The first printings of Utopia contained an illustrated map of the nation, and Giles, Mores friend and fellow witness to Hythlodays tale, supplied an Utopian alphabet.

Again and again More goes out of his way to try to persuade his readers that Utopia is a real place. In a prefatory letter from More to Giles, also included in the first editions, More asks his friend for help in remembering the exact length of a bridge that Hythloday mentions in his description, for while his job as author was a simple oneonly to rehearse those things which you and I together heard Master Raphael tell and declareand there remained no other thing for me to do but only write plainly the matter as I heard it spoken, he humbly admits his memory may be in doubt. More remembers hearing that the bridge was half a mile, or 500 paces long, but fears he might be in error, because he also recalls the river contains there not above three hundred paces in breadth. More wants to get his facts right. Yes, such suggestions of facticity were a common literary device at the time, yet they also add a veneer of veracity to the entire account. Mores memory might be faulty, but the place which he is remembering is undeniably real. As More comments to Giles in the same letter, I shall take good heed that there be in my book nothing false, so if there be anything in doubt I will rather tell a lie than make a lie, because I had rather be good than wise [wily]. Why would More expend so much effort making a case for the actual existence of a place like Utopia if he did not want it to be taken seriously by his audience?

While it stretches credulity to suggest that More expected his audience to fully to believe that Utopia is real, it is reasonable to argue that he uses fantasy to articulate political, economic and religious alternatives he really believes in. For instance, Hythloday mentions in Book II that the Utopians, when told about Christianity, approved of the religion as it seemed so favorable to that community of goods, which is an opinion so particular as was well as so dear to them; since they perceived that Christ and His followers lived by that rule. More, a devout Christian who once studied for the priesthood and would later give his life to honor his beliefs, had every reason to be sincere about the community of goods described in Utopia. Given who he was and what he believed, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine More satirizing Jesus and his followers.

The surname of the narrator of Utopia, Hythloday, may translate out as speaker of nonsense, but his Christian name, Raphael, finds its genesis in the Archangel Raphael, who gives sight to the blind. As such, Raphael Hythloday might therefore be recognized as a guide to help the reader see a greater truth. What obvious absurdities Utopia does containchamber pots made of precious metals, for examplecould be understood as a way to throw into sharp relief the corruptions of contemporary Christendom. Less charitably, such silliness could be seen as a sort of political cover for airing heretical political and religious views. By salting his tale with absurdities More can suggest these radical ideas yet at the same time politically distance himself from them. He has his cake and eats it too.

To sum up this perspective: More was serious about Utopia. He was earnest in his appreciation of the manners, customs, and laws of the Utopians, and used realism in order to convey a sense of genuine possibility. Just as the number of cities in Utopia matches the number of counties in England and Wales in Mores time, Utopia was meant to be experienced by the reader as a valid alternative to the real world in which they lived.

On the other hand, there is also evidence that More meant his Utopia to be read as a satire. In recent years, revisionist Utopiascholars have claimed that. far from being a sincere vision of the society we ought to have, the author used his imagined island as an extended argument for why such utopian visions are, literally, a joke. In addition to the destabilizing names given to the place and the narrator, More, in his description of the island of Utopia, makes attractive possibilities that hegiven his personal, economic, political, and religious position in lifewould be expected to be dead set against. He was a man, lawyer, property holder, future kings councilor, Lord Chancellor, and dogmatic defender of the faith, yet the island he describes has female equality, communal property, democratic governance, religious freedom, and no lawyers. This seems quite a contradiction. Indeed, in his later life More penned works attacking the very religious tolerance extolled in Utopia, and as Lord Chancellor, a position he attained in 1529, he investigated religious dissenters and presided over the burning at the stake of a half-dozen prominent Protestant heretics. In this light, Mores conscious use of the absurd in Utopia can be interpreted as undercutting the radical ideas advanced in his book, and the silliness of many of the customs and characteristics of Utopia taint any such idea of an ideal society. By inserting a political vision of an ideal world within a society that also uses chamber pots made of gold and silver, for instance, More effectively ridicules all political idealization.

More was a devout Christian, but (with his friend Erasmus) he was also a translator of the second-century Greek writer Lucian, a man known for his satirical and skeptical dialogues, and Utopia is stuffed with erudite irony that calls into question the sincerity of the story. For example, at one point Hythloday recalls how, in European and other Christian countries, political treaties and alliances are religiously observed as sacred and inviolable! Which is partly owing to the justice and goodness of the princes themselves, and partly to the reverence they pay to the popes. This sentence works in the book because Mores audience knows that the exact opposite is true: alliances and treaties were routinely broken by both church and state, and princes and popes were frequently neither just nor good. Given this, how are we to take anything that Hythloday says at face value?

The detailed descriptions of Utopian landmarks that give the account its sense of realism are likewise undermined by Mores use of humor. In the same prefatory letter to his friend Giles, in which he worries that he might not have his facts straight about the length of a bridge, More arrives at a solution to his dilemma: Wherefore, I most earnestly desire you, friend Peter, to talk with Hythloday, if you can face to face, or else write letters to him, and so to work in this matter that in this, my book, there may be neither anything be found that is untrue, neither anything be lacking which is true. The humor here comes in the realization that Hythloday will never contradict anything More writes, because Hythloday simply does not exist; there will be no fact-checking of Utopia because there is no one to contact to check the facts. An equally silly explanation for the impossibility of pinpointing Utopia on a world map is given by his friend Peter Giles who, in another letter appended to the early printings of Utopia, apologizes for the absence of coordinates by explaining that, at the exact moment that Hythloday was conveying the location to More and himself, someone nearby coughed loudly (!) and the travelers words were lost.

In his ancillary letters More takes issue with his contemporaries who claim that Utopia is just a farce, but his arguments are themselves farcical. In a letter attached to the 1517 edition, he defends the facticity of his account, explaining to his friend Giles that, if Utopia were merely fiction, he would have had the wit and sense to offer clues to tip off his learned audience. Thus, he states,

if I had put nothing but the names of prince, river, city and island such as might suggest to the learned that the island was nowhere, the city a phantom, the river without water, and the prince without a people, this would not have been hard to do, and would have been much wittier than what I did; for if the faithfulness of an historian had not been binding on me, I am not so stupid as to have preferred to use those barbarous and meaningless names, Utopia, Anyder, Amaurot and Ademus.

The irony here, which the knowing reader would certainly get, is that this is exactly what More has done: Utopia, the name of the island, means nowhere; Amaurot, the Utopian city described, means phantom, and so on. How are we to take More seriously?

Approaching Utopia ironically changes the meaning of Mores words, and what seemed sincere now appears sarcastic. When More comments to Giles that, I shall take good heed that there be in my book nothing false, so if there be anything in doubt I will rather tell a lie than make a lie, it is not an earnest declaration of his search for the truth, but a sly acknowledgement that he may be telling the reader a lie. The tokens of veracity I describe above the debate over the bridge, the Utopian alphabet, the maps and so forth far from being evidence for Mores sincerity, can be seen from this perspective as supporting materials for one big prank.

Further evidence that Utopia was meant to be understood as an erudite prank can be found in the ancillary material contributed by Mores friends. In a letter from Jerome de Busleyden to More, Busleyden praises Utopia, especially as it withholds itself from the many, and only imparts itself to the few. In other words, only the learned few will get the joke. This interpretation is reinforced by another letter included along with the text, this one from Utopia publisher Beatus Rhenanus to the wealthy humanist (and adviser to Emperor Maximillain on literary matters) Willibald Pirckheimer. After describing how one man, among a gathering of a number of serious men, argued that More deserved no credit for Utopia as he was no more than a paid scribe for Hythloday, Rhenanus switches from Latin to the even more rarefied Greek to write: Do you not, then, welcome this very cleverness of Moore, who leads such men as these astray?

Within the book, the character of More himself is not even convinced that what Hythloday has related is real. When, at the very end of Book II, More returns to the text as narrator, he tells the reader: When Raphael had thus made an end of speaking many things occurred to me, both concerning the manners and laws of that people, that seemed very absurd. More then lists a few of these absurdities: the Utopians manner of waging war, their religious practices, but chiefly, he states, what seemed the foundation of all the rest, their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away. In having More (the character) remain unconvinced at the end of Hythlodays story, More (the writer) seems to be rejecting not only the political vision of Utopia, but also the mode of persuasion that he suggested to Raphael in Book I. Utopia is indeed No-Place.

But there are more than two sides to the story of Utopia. While good arguments for both the satirical and sincere interpretations of the text can be made, I believe this binary debate obfuscates rather than clarifies the meaning of Mores work, and actually misses the political genius of Utopia entirely. The brilliance of Mores Utopia is that is it simultaneously satirical and sincere, absurd and earnest, and it is through the combination of these seemingly opposite ways of presenting ideals that a more fruitful way of thinking about political imagination can start to take shape. It is the presentation of Utopia as no place, and its narrator as nonsense, that creates a space for the readers imagination to wonder what an alternative someplace might be, and what a radically different sensibility might be like. In enabling this dialectical operation, Utopia opens up Utopia, encouraging the reader to imagine for themselves.

Mores second letter to his co-conspirator Peter Giles, which appears only in the 1517 edition, hints that this open reading of Utopia is what he hoped to provoke. The letter begins with More writing about an anonymous (and possibly invented) clever person who has read his text and offers the following criticism: [I]f the facts are reported as true, I see some absurdities in them; but if fictitious, I find Mores finished judgment in some respects wanting. More then goes on to write about this sharp-eyed critic that by his frank criticism he has obliged me more than anyone else since the appearance of the book. What to make of this curious criticism and Mores appreciation of it?

I believe it is this ideal readers refusal to wholly to accept Utopia as fact, yet also his dissatisfaction with the story as a good fiction, that obliges More. It is exactly because this reader positions Utopia between fact and fiction, and is not satisfied with either reading, that he is such a clever person. Yet this person, clever as he may be, is an accidental good reader; he wants Utopia to be one or the other, either fact or fiction, a sincere rendering of an actual land or a satirical send-up of an imaginary place. Now, when he questions whether Utopia is real or fictitious, More complains, I find his finished judgment wanting. It is the or in the first clause that is the problem here. Written in the tradition of serio ludere, or serious play that More admired so much in classic authors, the story is both fact and fiction, sincere and satirical. Utopia is someplace and no-place.

Utopia cannot be realized, because it is unrealistic. It is, after all, no place. Yet Utopias presentationnot only its copious claims towards facticity, but the very realism of the descriptionsgives the reader a world to imagine; that is, it is also some-place. It this works as springboard for imagination. More is not telling us simply to think about a different social order (Hythloday, as you will remember, tries this in Book I and fails) but instead conjures up a vision for us, drawing us into the alternative through characters, scenes, and settings in this phantasmagoric far-off land. We do not imagine an alternative abstractly, but inhabit it concretely, albeit vicariously. Upon their meeting, More (the character) begs Hythloday to describe in detail the wonderful world to which he has traveled, and asks him to set out in order all things relating to their soil, their rivers, their towns, their people, their manners, constitution laws, and, in a word, all that you can imagine we desire to know. More (the author/artist) then complies to his own request. Through Utopia we are presented with a world wholly formed, like an architects model or a designers prototype. We experience a sense of radical alterity as we step inside of it and try it on for size. For the time of the tales telling, we live in Utopia, its landscape seeming familiar and its customs becoming normal. This re-orients our perspective. More provides us with a vision of another, better worldand then destabilizes it.

This destabilization is the key. More imagines an alternative to his sixteenth-century Europe, which he then reveals to be a work of imagination. (It is, after all, no-place.) But the reader has been infected; another option has been shown. They cannot safely return to the assurances of their own present as the naturalness of their world has been disrupted. As the opening lines of a brief poem attached to the first printings of Utopia read:

Will thou know what wonders strange be,

in the land that late was found?

Will thou learn thy life to lead,

by divers ways that godly be?

Once an alternativedivers ways that godly behas been imagined, staying where one is or trying something else become options that demand attention and decision.

Yet the choice More offers is not an easy one. By disabling his own vision he keeps us from short-circuiting this imaginative moment into a fixed imaginary: a simple swapping of one image for another, one reality for another, the Emperor with clothes versus the Emperor without clothes. More will not let us accept (or reject) his vision of the ideal society as the final destination. In another poem attached to the early editions, this one printed in the Utopian language and in the voice of the island itself, Utopia explains:

I one of all other without philosophy

Have shaped for many a philosophical city.

In other words, Utopia does not have, nor does it provide the reader, a wholly satisfactory philosophy; its systems of logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology are constantly undercut by More. But it is because the reader cannot satisfy themselves within the confines of Utopia that it can become for many a philosophical city, a place that many can ponder and a space that makes room for all to think.

The problem with asking people to imagine outside the box is that, unaided, they usually will not. We may bend and shape the box, reveal its walls and pound against them, but our imagination is constrained by the tyranny of the possible. Computer programs demonstrate these limitations well. A good programbe it word processing software, a video game, or a simple desktop layoutenables immense possibilities for action (you can even personalize your preferences), but all this action is circumscribed by the programs code, and if you try to do something outside the given algorithms your action will not compute. Use the program long enough and you will forget that there is an outside. With Utopia, however, More provides a peculiar structure, a box that refuses to contain anything for long, a program that repeatedly crashes, yet a structure that succeeds in providing an alternative platform from which to imagine.

The problem with many social imaginaries is that they posit themselves as a realizable possibility. Their authors imagine a future or an alternative and present it as the future or the alternative. If accepted as a genuine social possibility, this claim leads to a number of, not mutually exclusive, results:

1. Brutalizing the present to bring it into line with the imagined futurewitness the Nazi genocide, communist forced collectivization or, in this century, the apocalyptic terrorism of radical Islam.

2. Disenchantment as the future never arrives, and the alternative is never realizedfor example, the descent and consequent depression of the New Left after 1968 or the ideological collapse of neoconservatism in the US after 2008.

3. A vain search for a new imaginary when the promised one fails to appear such as the failed promises of advertising that lead to an endless, and ultimately unsatisfying, cycle of consumption.

4. Living a lieas in The American Dream or Stalins Socialism achieved.

5. Rejecting possibility altogetherdismissing Utopia, with a heartfelt conservative distrust or an ironic liberal wink, as a nave impossibility.

But what if impossibility is incorporated into the social imaginary in the first place? This is exactly what More does. By positioning his imaginary someplace as no-place, he escapes the problems that typically haunt political imaginaries. Yes, the alternatives he describes are sometimes absurd (gold and silver chamber pots? a place called no-place?), but this conscious absurdity is what keeps Utopia from being a singular and authoritative narrative that is, a closed act of imagination to be either accepted or rejected.

In his second letter to Peter Giles, More mounts a defense of absurdity, writing that he cannot fathom how such a clever person, who has criticized Utopia for containing absurdities, can carry on as if there were nothing absurd in the world, or as if any philosopher had ever ordered the state, or even his own house, without instituting something that had better be changed. In this striking passage More links the absurd with a call for revision, seamlessly transitioning from a recognition that the world contains many absurdities to making the point that philosophers creations are never perfect. In the last clause he even suggests that all philosophical plans and orders, whether public or private, are incomplete; they always contain things which ought to be altered. More is, no doubt, referring to his own Utopia here. In creating a philosophical order himself, then salting it with absurdities and ironies, More is making sure the reader will not accept the plan he has described as perfect, complete, or finished, thus, he leaves the door open for reflection and criticism.

Think back to Mores advice to Hythloday in Book I regarding social criticism. Instead of confronting people directly with ones alternative opinion, it is far more effective, More says, to cast about and employ an indirect approach that meets people where they are. To make this point, More draws from the stage, a telling metaphor that implies a means of persuasion in which the audience is drawn into an alternative reality. But recall as well Hythlodays response: Mores method is nothing more than a creative means for lying. For all its limitations, the advantage of direct criticism is that its very negation sets in motion a constant questioning whereby any claims are subjected to rigorous interrogation. It is an open system of thought. But what sorts of checks are there on the phantasmagoric alternatives generated by the dramatic artist or social philosopher? An open Utopia is Mores answer. By creating an alternative reality and simultaneously undermining it, he encourages the reader not be taken in by the fantasy. In other words, it is hard to fool someone with a lie if they already know it is one. The absurd fact, or the faulty fiction, that the clever person initially objected to is precisely what leaves Utopia open to being challenged and, more important, approached as something that had better be changed.

This openness can be problematic. If an advantage of a Utopia open to criticism, participation, modification, and re-creation is that it never hardens into a fixed state that then closes down popular engagement, the possible disadvantage is that such an open Utopia functions poorly as a political ideal. It could be argued that in the process of continual destabilization, Utopia never attains the presence, imaginal or otherwise, necessary to function as a prompt for action. Utopia is therefore not a motivating vision of the promised land, but more like a hallucination in the desert: nothing we should walk toward or work for. To continue with the Biblical analogies: Utopia is the Jewish Messiah who never arrives. But the value of the Jewish Messiah, as Walter Benjamin points out, is not that he or she never arrives, but that their arrival is imminent, every second of time [is] the straight gate through which the Messiah might arrive. Similarly, Utopia gives us something to imagine, anticipate and prepare for. Utopia is not present, as that would preclude the work of popular imagination and action (It has already arrived, so what more is there to do?); nor, however, is it absent, since that would deny us the stimulus with which to imagine an alternative (There is only what we have always known!). Utopia is imminent possibility.

Utopia, however, occupies a different position. It is present. Utopia as an ideal may forever be on the horizon, but Mores Utopia is an ink and paper book that one can behold (and read) in the here and now. It like the Messiah who arrives and announces their plan for the world. However, as was the case with the Christian Messiah, the presence embodied within Mores text exists only for a moment, its power, glory and permanence undermined by its inevitable destruction. This curious state of being and not being, a place that is also no-place, is what gives Utopia its power to stimulate imagination, for between these poles an opening is created for the reader of Utopia to imagine, What if? for themselves.

What if? is the Utopian question. It is a question that functions both negatively and positively. The question throws us into an alternative future: What if there were only common property? But because we still inhabit the present, we also are forced to look back and ask: How come we have private property here and now? Utopia insists that we contrast its image with the realities of our own society, comparing one to the other, stimulating judgment and reflection. This is its critical moment. But this critical reflection is not entirely negating. That is, it is not caught in the parasitical dependency of being wed to the very system it calls into question, for its interlocutor is not only a society that one wants to tear down but also a vision of a world that one would like to build. (This is what distinguishes the What if? of Utopia from the same question posed by dystopias.) Utopian criticism functions not as an end in itself, but as a break with what is for a departure towards something new. By asking What if? we can simultaneously criticize and imagine, imagine and criticize, and thereby begin to escape the binary politics of impotent critique on the one hand and closed imagination on the other.

When teaching or speaking on Utopia, I often find that the ensuing discussion becomes a debate about the content of the bookthat is, whether the characteristics of the alternative society described by More are something to be admired or condemned. There is certainly much to admire about Mores Utopia: the island nations communalism and its inhabitants consideration for one another, for example; or the rational planning of a society that provides labor, leisure, education, and healthcare for all; or a system of justice that seems truly just, as well as a level of religious and intellectual tolerance that today, in our times, seems to be in retreat. And then, of course, there is the blissful lack of lawyers. But there is also much to condemn about Mores alternative society: the formal and casual patriarchy that leaves women subservient to men; the colonization of nearby lands and the Utopians forced removal of those foreign populations deemed not properly productive; the societys system of slavery which, though relatively benign by sixteenth-century standards, still leaves some people the property of others. And while Utopia may be just as a society, Utopians, as individuals, have little freedom to determine their own lives. Finally, like so many Utopias, Mores Utopia, with its virtuous customs and wholesome amusements seems, well, a bit boring.

Such a conversation about the characteristics of Mores imaginary island has a certain value, but to get hung up on the details of Utopia, as with the debate over whether the author is sincere or satirical, is to miss the greater point. The details of the society artfully sketched by More do matter, but only in so far as they provides a vivid place to which the reader might journey, and vicariously inhabit for a time. As More tried to convince Hythloday back in Book I, dramatic immersion is a far more effective means of persuasion than combative criticism. But to defend or attack this or that law or custom of Utopia is to mistake the value of the text, for it is not the specific details conveyed in its content that are truly radical but rather the transformative work the content does. This is where Mores (political) artistry is most effective.

Toward the end of his account of the fanciful Island, Raphael Hythloday, leader of the blind and speaker of nonsense, tells More (and us) that Utopia, because of the plans adopted and the structural foundations laid, is like to be of great continuance. Indeed it will continue, for the very plan and structure of Mores Utopia makes it a generative textone that guarantees that imagination does not stop when the author has finished writing and the book is published. All texts are realized and continuously re-realized by those who experience them and in this way they are forever rewritten, but More went to special pains to ensure that his imaginative act would not be the last word. Lest the reader find themselves too comfortable in this other world he has created, the author goes about unsettling his alternative society, building with one hand while disassembling with the other, fashioning a Utopia that must be engaged dialectically.

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Introduction: Open Utopia | The Open Utopia

Image: Courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

A new biography of Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the Futurama, tells the story of American innovation.

Inside every utopia is a dystopia striving to get out. World-changing plans to bring all human life and activity under beneficent control devolve inevitably into regimentation and compulsion. Edenic life-affirming communes descend into chaos and waste. Our presently evolving techutopia has barely reached its peak, and yet in it this horror-movie process has already begun: information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate; common human connections are degraded; limits on power and self-dealing erode. Inequality increases with differential access. And all this in less than a single generation.

The utopian promises of the mid-twentieth century (modernism, broadly understood) stayed alive for longer, largely because its projects, which depended on design, manufacturing processes, materials, and city planning, took years or decades to be fully realized, while the world seemed to stay much the same. In 1939 the greater part of America was still a land of Toonerville trolleys, boarding houses, balky mules, door-to-door salesmen, pump handles, iceboxes, A&Ps, nerve tonics, kerosene, two-bit haircuts, hand-rolled cigarettes, incurable diseases, and patched inner-tubes, even as the idea of the future was brought closer with every newsreel and skyscraper and issue of Life or Look.

While older utopias often were predicated on returning to the virtues of an imagined past, a key figure behind this utopia of the new was Norman Bel Geddes, a theatre designer turned industrial designer. Bel Geddes is best known for designing the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, a huge and hugely celebrated vision of the world of 1960, full of towering modernist skyscrapers in new cities and lots and lots of cars.

The World's Fair assumed that the future would simply remake us as it came into being.

In a rich, swift, and entrancing new biography, The Man Who Designed the Future, Barbara Alexander Szerlip goes so far as to credit Bel Geddes with the invention of twentieth century America. Credit for that is more commonly ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison or Henry Ford, but Szerlips claim is justified if by the twentieth century we mean the things, the look, the places, and the occasions of the new. Bel Geddes, as Szerlip shows, invented the new not once but again and again, superficially and radically, in theater and stage design, in the windows of department stores, in appliances, public spaces, tools, and spectacles.

All that kept his projects from wholly burdening the future with the utopian condition of corruption was that many were imaginary, ephemeral, unbuilt or destroyed; the simplest and smallest (a gas range, an electric typewriter, a dance floor) can still inspire the common American nostalgia for the new.

How did he become who he would be? Szerlips first chapters recount an 1890s Midwestern upbringing reminiscent of Orson Welless depiction of The Magnificent Ambersons: a huge Victorian house with broad lawns and deep porches, and prize-winning horses with silver-plated harnesses that would soon be replaced by large cars. The Geddes family was ruled by a grandfather, the judge, and cared for by several servants, including a Native American man named Will de Haw who served as the young Normans teacher, groom, handler, and coachman for years. Norman grew up fascinated with Indians: his first major theater spectacle would be a pageant-play about Native American lore.

Normans father also seems drawn from a novel of the period: a charming, careless and restless man who after the judges death invested the family money unwisely, losing the big house and the prize horses, and who left his family in bad straits to go recoup in businesses elsewhere. He failed and died young, perhaps by suicide.

That is the origin story, and the right one for the work the young Norman set out upon. As a penniless striving illustrator and adman, dreamer of vast theater projects, tinkerer and toymaker, he was so sure of himself that he traveled to New York to pitch his radical idea for stage lighting to the great impresario David Belasco. Instead of flat overhead lights and footlights, he said, theatres ought to use thousand-watt spotlights, dimmable and in any color, to pick out which part of the stage the audiences attention should be drawn to; side-lighting should be used to model and heighten actors faces. Belasco dismissed the 24-year old novice and his plans and then adopted the idea, advertising it as his own. But do we guess that Norman will be sidelined, driven back to the provinces for good? We do not.

Back in Ohio he meets Helen Belle Schneider, aka Bel, a young school teacher who graduated second in her class at Smith College. Her passions were music and poetry, Szerlip tells us, and more enchanting, she was a master of bird calls. The afternoon they met he kissed her. She was a Methodist (as was his family) and a teetotaler. They were soon partners in the advertising and art business in Toledo, and he added her nickname to his own, becoming Norman Bel Geddes. They married and had two daughters (the youngest, Barbara, became an actress and is likely better known today than her father).

The invention of twentieth century America can be ascribed to Norman Bel Geddes, alongside Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

Lifted by his talents and the times, Bel Geddes leaves the wife and kids and family business in Toledo and goes back to New York, that cosmopolitan realm of endless possibility. The late 20s were when his greatest theater successes were made. Szerlip recounts the epic story of Bel Geddess work on the pageant-play The Miracle, produced and directed by Max Reinhardt, for which he turned a large Broadway theater into a Gothic cathedral. Theater-goers entered what appeared to be a dim, towering 110-foot church, their footsteps echoing on the stone-slabbed aisles (an asbestos composition).

As they looked for their seats (pews for 3,100 people), priests, sacristans and the occasional worshiper would be moving about lighting candles or counting their beads. The smell of incense would mix with the smell of melting wax. The only illumination, beyond the candles (more than 800) and faux candles (834), would be brilliant shafts of artificial sunlight, punctuating the sacred gloom through three dozen Bel Geddes-designed stained glass windowsranging from 40 to 80 feet in height, made of thin 10,000-square-foot sheets of muslin stretched and painted to appear semitransparent when lit from behind.

The numbers are impressive even now. Costs exceeded a half-million in 1928 dollars, or some five million in todays. And it was a vast, long-lasting, wildly-praised, continent-touring hit. From then on producers interested in high-risk innovative spectacles counted on Bel Geddes to bring them in successfully.

Keeping up with Bel Geddess meteoric rise tests Szerlips considerable storytelling skills; the sensational anecdotes and sidebars come so fast that they clamber over one another, sometimes falling out of order. Often she has to backtrack from Bel Geddes designing a car or a stove to Bel Geddes in the theater or remaking a corporate boardroom. The book is crowded with detail and managed seemingly on the fly, as the mans projects often were. It is dizzying and highly accomplished fun.

Bel Geddes triumphed with innovative designs even for forgettable or trivial plays; every opening night was packed with the worlds of art and wit and money. Szerlip carries her subject through 1920s Manhattan with so many famous names dropped that the reader risks a slip-and-fall. In the course of an afternoon, Szerlip tells us, he met William and Lucius Beebe, Nelson Doubleday, Alva Johnston, cartoonists Don Marquis and Rube Goldberg, photographer Arnold Genthe, Broadway producer Gilbert Miller, conductor Walter Damrosch, painter Rockwell Kent and the Prime Minister of Australia. She makes time for a thrilling recap of Bel Geddess minutes-long affair with the diarist Anais Nin after a night in the Harlem nightclubs he loved. (He was a great dancer.)

It is all swift and smart and charming, and by the time it turns darker with the Depression, Bel Geddes has not yet thought about inventing the future. That would come when he put aside the immense career he had built in theater and popular art and turned instead to designing places and things of use to the new world coming to be: things and places that would themselves be that new world.

What would come to be called industrial design was chiefly the province of engineers and architects, and Bel Geddes was neither. He certainly engineered things that he needed for his projects, and he designed spaces and places, but he was forced to add a line to his contracts stating that he and his firm were not architects. His talent was imaginationnot only imagining how something should look, but why, and for what purpose, and how it could be made to serve that purpose.

Bel Geddes designed the places and things that would themselves constitute the new world.

One of Szerlips most revealing stories is of the remake of the Standard Gas Equipment companys household gas range in 1930. Bel Geddes refused to simply remake the look of their stodgy product. He started from the beginning, sending out a team of investigators to ask people, especially women, what they would like to see in a new stove and what their complaints were about the old one. The result was what we still think of as a stove. SGE ranges had fixed oven racks; Bel Geddes made them slide out, for obvious reasons. He saw that the floor beneath a black enameled cabinet standing on legs like a bureau would get filthy and could be cleaned only on hands and knees; his would be flush with the floor, as they all are now. His design was white, with gleaming curved sides and bands of chrome that signified new, sleek, and faststreamlined, in other words.

Streamlining, which would forever be associated with the industrial and commercial design of the period, began as a set of guidelines meant to reduce air and water resistance (drag on planes and cars and ships). It also imparted to objects an inherent yet gratuitous beauty that entranced people and designers alike, the very essence of new. The style rarely achieved the goals set for it (1930s cars and trains did not travel fast enough to be affected very much by air resistance), but it persisted as pure style, as signifier. And the look could be applied to anything. Before long, Szerlip notes, there were streamlined radios, typewriters, and Chippewa potatoes (the absence of deep eyes reduces waste in peeling and also speeds up the job for the housewife), streamlined financial cutbacks, weight loss programs, inkwells and coffins. We now had a word we did not know we needed, for uses we did not expect would arise. But the greatest efflorescence of applications for it came in the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, the site of Bel Geddess best-known triumph.

The 1939 fair was conceived by what might be called practical utopians. That is, it was an enclosed space where new and better modes of life could be shown to be possible and workable. It was as much prescription as prediction. Social theorists, businessmen, and academics were recruited to educate the public in the industrialized, communitarian, engineered world that was sure to comethe world of tomorrow, as the slogans promised. They urged exhibitors not to simply show their goods and services, but to show the processes by which they were made, the worldwide trade in commodities they depended on, and the advances in cybernetics and administration they would bring about.

This got international businesses excited, and a lot of exhibitors not only invested hugely in educational displaysit was effectually the start of the modern audio-visual instruction modebut also looked into the future, showing robots, simulated voyages to the moon, flying cars, streamlined everything. Bel Geddess Futurama within the General Motors exhibit hall (which he also designed) was the culmination. GM was set to redo the show they had built for the 1933 Chicago fair: an animated diorama of an assembly line, showing Chevys being put together. Butas in a scene from a movie of the periodBel Geddes took a night flight to Detroit to meet with GMs management and argue for something much grander. What if the goal, Szerlip recounts, was to have the public wedded to GMs vision, and to make that vision so attractive and accessible that the average Jack and Jill would have a hard time imagining a future apart from it? It is made more cinematic by Szerlips visual effects, with stuffy executives from central casting and the Old Man (in this case Alfred Sloan, chairman of the board) arising at last to anoint the brash optimist. Whos to say it didnt happen exactly as Bel Geddes, and Szerlip, tell it?

The Futurama not only talked about the future, it was the future. Bel Geddes, like a mad father setting up the worlds biggest train set for his kids, let people see the year 1960 in busy moving detail. Some 50,000 miniature streamlined cars traveled on miniature multilane highways like none that had then been built (buses and trains were, for obvious reasons, not emphasized). In that future America, the past had been scrubbed away. Not even farms and orchards were the same, and Bel Geddess towers and ports and highways arose without any reference to the past. It posed, without actually asking, the great question that utopias are never quite able to solve: how do we get from this flawed and hurtful world we live in, and the flawed and confused people we are, to the rational and cooperative world we want? The Futurama and the fair assumed that the future would simply remake us as it came into being, so that we could profit from its wondersthat the wonders would make the people, rather than the other way around.

The utopian visions of the Worlds Fair were deliberately conceived in opposition not only to the wounded and weary America of the Depression, but to alternative utopian visions that were then making great strides around the world. Nazi Germany had no pavilion at the fair, though it was very much present in spirit. Lewis Mumford, author of The City in History and one of the initial planners of the fair, had envisioned the World of Tomorrow as a school for democracy, an education for visitors in taking charge of their world and their future. The new sciences and technologies, manufacturing processes, communications and social organization had to be understood, he argued, in order to be useful and successful for all, or for as many as possible.

But Mumford ended up disappointed in the fair as built. It simply asserted the completely tedious and unconvincing belief in the triumph of modern industry. The less said about that today, the better, he wrote at the time. The fair was still receiving millions of visitors when the German army invaded Poland, initiating a new world war only twenty-five years after the first began. The world had not only failed to learn the right lessons, it seemed to have internalized the wrong ones.

Bel Geddes should perhaps be included with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles as 'a kind of magnificent failure.'

Bel Geddes spent the war years working on projects for the military, both ones they asked him for, such as better camouflage, and his own ideas, like a remote-controlled Television Bombing Plane (early television had been a big draw at the 1939 fair). But his great interest was the car. In a glamorous 1940 photo-book, Magic Motorways, he envisioned the American highway system, complete with multiple lanes and on-and-off ramps. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened its first stretch that very year, but it wasnt until 1956 that the Interstate Highway System was officially established. When it was, it was as much the offspring of Bel Geddess Futurama and the dominance of the car as it was a result of the bomb and the need for a rapid-response national defense.

Of course, the unintended ramifications of that long project include large components of air pollution and climate change, the slow death of public transportation, the erosion of cities and Main Street, and the sprawling expansion of a peacetime military. The challenge of changing the dystopia we find ourselves in now, again, is stupefying.

But just because a utopia is unattainable in practiceunattainable is almost part of the definitionthat doesnt mean the utopian impulse cant have great power along a different parameter. In an important way it is not different from the general impulse to create imagined worlds that have no larger purpose than to be seen and experienced, in theater, in fiction, on film, in the model-train landscape of tunnels, bridges and stations running endlessly for its own sake.

In this respect it is interesting that in 1964, when a Worlds Fair was again held in New York City, General Motors largely recycled the Bel Geddes future it had promised would already be in place by then. The point turned out not to be the future after all, except in the power it granted to the imagination to see it all as possible. The 1939 fair might have been conceived as a training course in living under late capitalism, but time has vacated that purpose and in a sense restored its innocence. It affords now not false promises of easy social progress butin Vladimir Nabokovs termsaesthetic bliss: that is, a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

Szerlips book has only reached the two-thirds mark when the Futurama is behind her. The last hundred pages are as full as the first two hundred, with new projects, new love affairs, Barbaras stardom and retreat, more famous names, a plan to put The Miracle on film starring Katherine Hepburn or maybe Greta Garbobut fewer real accomplishments. When he died, in 1958, on a New York street of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five, Bel Geddes was pretty much broke and on his way to being forgotten. Szerlip, who obviously loves the man, tags him as oxymoronic: a pacifist fascinated by war, a naturalist who loved technology, a serious prankster, a pragmatic futurist, a private man who was rarely alone.

Bel Geddes was a practical man. He was an engineer and a maker who worked in the real world of mechanical stresses and materials and mass production and financing. It is impossible to distinguish between what he did to please his paying clients and what he did just because he wanted to see if he couldwhich is a fair definition of a popular artistand often enough he could convince magnates and manufacturers that what he wanted to do was exactly what they needed.

Yet his most inspiring projects might be the impossible ones, the gratuitous acts of the imagination: the absurdly vast airliner with ballroom and orchestra, the unrealized theater projects, the flying carand the aerial restaurant. Szerlip wonders if Bel Geddes should be included with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles as a kind of magnificent failure. His standing ratio of conceptions realized to those unrealized, after all, was about 50-50. But the gorgeous only-imagined ones defy time and perversion. They obey perforce the greatest single prescription ever laid down for human action: first do no harm.

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Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia - Boston Review

A hundred years before architect Adolf Loos published the Modernist manifesto, Ornament and Crime, a similar guiding set of principles honesty, utility and simplicity was inspiring a religious sect to develop a design aesthetic that became its livelihood. The Shakers inherent modesty called for a rejection of unnecessary decoration and resulted in a minimalist and austere sense of beauty thats often misunderstood today, when the term Shaker is more likely to be used to describe door panels on big-box store cabinetry. But a series of recent exhibitions is aiming to enlighten the world about the influence of this small, influential and all-but-extinct group, and a design ethos that feels even more relevanttoday.

Theres something about stripping down something to its central shape and its essential elements that is always going to be appealing to people, says Lesley Herzberg, the curator at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For them, work is a form of worship, so anything they made was a way to worship God. It really did need to be made to the best of yourability.

Enfield Shaker table by John Baker and JasonCollett.

Mjlk

The Shakers were founded in Manchester, England by Ann Lee (known as Mother Ann), a former Quaker who had a vision of being reborn as a child of God. In 1774, Mother Ann and eight followers arrived in America and settled in Watervliet, New York where they established the first Shaker community. By the mid-1800s, when woodworking proved to be a prosperous business, over two-dozen Shaker communities with a combined population of 6,000 existed down the East Coast of the United States, from Maine to Florida.

The groups pacifism made them exempt from military service during the American Civil War and record numbers joined the group during that period. They were really proud of how progressive they were, says John Baker, the co-owner of the Toronto design shop Mjlk. They didnt recognize slavery and they didnt recognize race or discrimination between men andwomen.

Although Shakers embraced modern technology, the boom in industrial manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century proved to be too stiff competition for their meticulous approach, and the Shaker population began to decline. Today, only a few living Shakers remain, but several settlements have been preserved as places of pilgrimage fordesigners.

A circa 1910 ladder-back chair from the ShakerMuseum.

Mjlk

In the 20th century, Shaker objects including furniture, boxes, textiles and tools became a source of great inspiration for modern design luminaries. In 1937, Freda Diamond developed a Shaker-inspired collection for Herman Miller. George Nakashima, who often referred to himself as a Japanese Shaker, referenced their slat or ladder chair backs. And Hans Wegner integrated Shaker austerity into an aesthetic that we now associate with Danishdesign.

The current revival can be traced back to 2015, when the exhibition Masterpieces of Shaker Design (1820 to 1890) was on display at the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, Netherlands along with an accompanying publication, Shaker: Function, Purity, Perfection, produced by Assouline in collaboration with the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, in New Lebanon, NewYork.

Last year, John and Wonhee Arndt of Studio Gorm debuted the collaborative project, Furnishing Utopia, at New York Design Week (it recently travelled to the 2017 Stockholm Furniture & Lighting Fair). Prompted by their own visit to a historic Shaker site, its an ongoing investigation into the design-savvy sects craft principles. There is an honesty to the way Shakers created their work, says John Arndt, one half of the Eugene, Oregon-basedcouple.

The Brush Study by Zo Mowat from the Furnishing Utopiaproject.

CHARLIE SCHUCk

In partnership with the Hancock Shaker Village and the Shaker Museum, a group of international designers Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, Darin Montgomery, Norm Architects, Jonah Takagi, Studio Tolvanen, Christopher Specce, Gabriel Tan, Ze Mowat, Tom Bonamici and Hallgeir Homstvedt attended a week-long workshop before being invited to produce new work that embodies theaesthetic.

We were so impressed with their use of colour, says Wonhee Arndt. Most of the interactions [with the Shaker aesthetic] that we had before visiting Hancock was through books, where most of the furniture is shown in dark colours or natural wood, but we found Shakers used so many vibrant colours like yellow, blue, green, red and even pink. Those hues are beautifully realized in Montreal-based Mowats brushes, made with white oak and natural horsehair. Colour also popped up in Ladies & Gentlemen Studios take on the classic Shaker work desk, complete with compartments and wheels that were common in large-scale furniture. Studio Gorm opted for natural maple for its iteration of a rocking chair with a spindle back. Last summer, Furnishing Utopia held a second workshop and added three additional design studios for an upcoming collection that will be shown during New York Design Week inMay.

A Shaker design revival is taking hold in Canada, too. In January, Mjlk hosted the group exhibition, That is Best Which Works Best, as part of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. The show mixed contemporary pieces with two-dozen original items from the Hancock village. Winnipeg-based Thom Fougere interpreted the shows theme as an elegant fire tool set. Oslo-based Hallgeir Homstvedt produced a hanging rail and mirror, his take on the ubiquitous peg rail that borders most Shaker rooms. Bakers contribution was a multi-use Shaker drawer table created with Jason Collett.

Since the group is often confused with the likes of Quakers, the Amish and Mennonites, the Mjlk installation was a history lesson for many visitors. I was surprised how many people didnt know of the Shakers, says Baker. They made a huge impact on our everyday life; they invented so many things such as the apple parer, and were inventive in how they utilized space andfunction.

Even though knowledge of Shakers is hit or miss among design consumers, Herzberg notes that members of the group itself seemed aware of the impact of their work. To illustrate that point, she references a quote from an elderly Shaker woman in the 1984 Ken Burns documentary, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God, in which she says that she fully expects to be remembered as a chair after her death. They recognized even then that their legacy in this world wasnt necessarily their religion and their tradition, she says. It was their material culture that has been widely disseminated andcelebrated.

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Pure and simple - The Globe and Mail

Lisbons new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) seems like ideal location to consider the current mood of urban civilisation. The smooth, naturalistic yet futuristic building designed by Amanda Leveterises up out of the bank of the river Tagus, in a city which, even after the crippling nationwide financial crisis of 2010, received Wallpapers Best City award for 2017.The inaugural exhibition titled Utopia/Dystopia: A paradigm shift in art and architecture sparked by the 500th anniversary of Thomas Mores seminal text Utopia presents over 60 works by artist and architects who examine shifts in political structures through physical manifestations of constructed and envisioned urban designs.

Curators Pedro Gadanho, Joo Laia and Susana Ventura, whose backgrounds vary across architectural and artistic expertise, do not distinguish in the exhibition between artists and architects, presenting conceptual ideas across the two disciplines side by side, and selecting practitioners with diverse background. To name a few from the group show: Didier Faustino, Kader Attia, Tacita Dean, Cao Fei, OMA, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The exhibition charts the gathering skepticism of idealistic modernist designs of the late 20th century, moving towards the contemporary obsession with dystopia, fuelled by science fiction and the internet, which has turned into somewhat of a dark fantasy, directly associated with post-internet culture, digital and nomadic values of freedom, a free (and black) market, spiraling lawlessness and statelessness. These concepts present interesting alternatives to post-capitalist, nationalist and neo-facist structures that are gaining power, yet losing control, across the globe today.

Cities of the Avant-Garde, by Wai Think Tank, 2012

While showing a gradual progression from modern to contemporary movements, the exhibition communicates across sections, curated in a layered chaos, spatially combining drawings, photography, sound and video. The layered configuration echoes the conceptual layered universe we are trying to explore, says Laia. Described by MAAT director and curator Gadanho as a media happy show, the exhibition journey integrates smaller spaces for video works fluidly through the gallery, which flows around the central oval-shaped arena for performance art where Mexican artist Hctor Zamoras incredible piece Order and Progress played out on the night of the public opening.

Defining the period of modernity from the end of Enlightenment to Hiroshima, the curators present optimistic and pessimistic approaches to modernist urban plans, real and imagined. How ideal can a city be? And how do you create a city that is perfect? questioned Gadanho to himself when curating the show.

Imagining the future, Alexander Brodsky & Ilya Utkins etching on paper of the urban landscape of 2001, titled Wandering Turtle, made in 1955, shows endlessly multiplying Manhattan-style blocks, while Archizooms No stop city a model or sculpture made between 1969-2001 shows an ever-expanding suburban town. These saturated vistas with their endlessly multiplying buildings echo the over-stimulated urban ecology that we begin to face.In Michael MacGarrys work Luanda, Angola, 2019 (100 Suns series), 2010, an archival inkjet print on cotton paper, the artists envisions a Dubai-like landscape with hundreds of Burj Khalifa-style towers multiplying across the horizon. Instead of the blocky skyscrapers or the detached houses for families of four, collective cities have been replaced by the ambitions of the individual.

Now, buildings act alone in competition for daylight, views and the title of the tallest and soon, darkness will prevail for the best of us. Inci Eviners video installation Nursing Modern Fall, 2012, plays out during this realisation here humans are working out, training and building, all set on a globe map on which Auschwitz is marked.Other works in the exhibition present dystopia as a form of beauty, or a sickly fantasy at least. Tabor Robaks HD video work is a rolling screen-saver style video evolving slowly through futuristic neon skyscrapers a four-dimensional style of pop art and an immersive sphere of amusement that echoes an endless digital scroll.

Installation views of works by DIS Collective and Nasan Tur

The end of the exhibition takes a post-internet turn, and how could it not. The internet is the space where this fascination with dystopia plays out. Curators of the previous, post-internet heavy Berlin Biennale, DIS Collective are included in the exhibition along with other BB9 featured artists including yr, Jonas Staal and Ryan Trecartin who present the communities who exist in these dystopian worlds. Mixing up a sour cocktail of human traits/flaws and technological hybridity, the artists in this section of the exhibition are an acquired taste. While they are products of capitalism, they revel in the destruction of it, looking to create, like the digital landscape, a free zone where people are free to destruct as much as they construct.

Nasan Turs work, Comunism, Capihtalism, Sociallism, 2016, misspells political ideologies in neon lights, referencing our current crisis of terminology to describe the political state of affairs. The problem is that now these political concatenations have lost their potency and their effectiveness writes Franco Berardi in his catalogue essay for the exhibition, Futurability Map. We are in freefall.And while the diagnoses of depression and anxiety are rising across the world, especially in young people and how soon will it be until narcissism epidemic eschews perhaps, like this post-internet generation of artists, we too need to learn to delight in instability, if we have the privilege to remain critical that is, to understand the freedom that it gives us.

Looking at the works of Yona Friedman, founder of the mobile architecture theory which argued for the idea of a non-community, and Jonas Staal, who examines ideas of co-existence in specific urban situations and the idea of democracy without a state, featured towards the end of the show, the viewer does not give up hope altogether, yet leaves with a better understanding of how utopia and dystopia could collaborate, and how idealism and realism might too.

ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITIONS

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Paradigm shift: the MAAT's inaugural exhibition debates a new world order - wallpaper.com

Can millennials build the world's most sustainable modern town from scratch?

That's the premise of "Jungletown" (8 p.m. Tuesdays on Viceland), a documentary series about the vision of Jimmy Stice. With his shaggy hair and mellow vibe, he seems to have just stepped off a surfboard, but he's a real estate entrepreneur and is good at wooing Silicon Valley investors and "interns" for his town-building project.

The series follows 80 young interns who pay $5,000 to spend 10 weeks in a remote, muddy, yet lush corner of Panama. They come to Kalu Yala, as the town is called, with big dreams but soon realize they're not in paradise. There's horse poop everywhere and it needs to be shoveled. And the jungle is ... a jungle.

Two interns leave because, as Stice puts it, "they didn't understand the vision," which he says is "researching how you can live beautifully." Meanwhile, he jets off to conferences and stocks up on pinot noir.

Millennial stereotypes are as plentiful as the ants that crawl the jungle floor. People have "idea orgasms." And they debate whether a man bun is the best way to tame unruly locks. Still, it makes for thought-provoking TV. Is Kalu Yala a way to heal the Earth, a real estate investment or a loony pipe dream?

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Can millennials create a new utopia in 'Jungletown'? - Colorado Springs Gazette

Reviewed with help from Jonathan Brown (Yogdog)

Stellaris release in the middle of last year saw Paradox Development Studio turning over a new leaf. No longer were their grand strategy games confined to the history of our planet, but they were branching out into our potential future and interstellar conquest. However, much like all of PDS games, Stellaris felt more like a foundation for the team to grow and build upon and now, coming up on a year later, theyve done just that with the major Utopia expansion and the associated 1.5 Banks update.

As is typical of Paradox games, theres a paid expansion and a free update. The expansions get a lot of the flashier changes, but that doesnt mean that there are slim pickings for those with the base game, and Banks has some significant changes and additions of its own.

The underlying civics and ethics that your empires government has been built upon have been reworked to allow for greater customisation, and thats fed into the main part of the game with the overhauled factions. These groups have certain desires and political demands that you ought to try and satisfy. Some will have unreasonable demands, but successfully balancing the factions that pop up can maintain the status quo, and even let you adopt a new set of ethics and form of government, while seriously neglecting a faction can lead to an uprising. The Utopia expansion lets you push to new extremes, with the singular Hive Mind and the diplomacy shunning Fanatic Purifier government.

Similarly, deciding species rights within your empire has been reformed to give you more options when expanding to encapsulate another species. Certainly, you can give them equal rights, trying to integrate them, but you can also purge them in new and cruel ways processing, neutering or forcing them into labour and there are three new types of slavery.

One thing that Banks really helps to foster is a feeling that your empire can evolve and change over time. Alongside factions and species rights is the new Traditions system and the Unity resource that you need to foster to unlock them. Split into seven different mini tech trees, these effectively amount to boosts and perks, helping you to push a particular path, whether its engendering a sense of discovery and exploration or enabling your empire to get the most out of vassal states.

The Tradition trees tie in neatly with the Ascension Perks that are a big part of the Utopia update. Completing a particular trees unlocks lets you pick from a list of perks that your empire satisfies; a perk that could be anything, from letting you build Megastructures through to letting you implant your mind in robotic bodies, or master your biological evolution and so on.

The Megastructures are easily the most eye-catching new additions to the game, letting a relatively confined empire built tall and continue to grow within their borders. It starts with creating space stations that can be substitutes for small planets, before you pick up the relevant technologies that allow you to then construct Dyson spheres to siphon all the energy from a star, ring worlds, massive sensor arrays and so on, each of which have to be built in stages over a period of years, if not decades. Though not unique, as with Civilizations wonders, theyre satisfying, if time consuming, to work towards creating.

Ascension Perks allow you to really focus your civilisations growth in a particular direction, which the Traditions dont let you do on their own. In fact, the Traditions cut against the role playing nature of the game, where you set out to play in a particular fashion. Youll undoubtedly earn enough Unity to unlock each and every option, but while youd think that Harmony would nullify or lessen the Domination and Supremacy trees, you can simply unlock them all and they remain constant between playthroughs. It means you end up with boosts that do little to nothing for your style of play, similar to how your scientific research ends up encompassing all possible technology, without branching you off in any specific direction. Its a minor point to raise, but it detracts from the overall feel of the game and the system.

While Utopia and the Banks update expand and rewrite some significant parts of the game, Stellaris is still left sorely lacking in other areas, and Im keen to see Paradox push on in those regards sooner rather than later. The entire diplomacy system needs to be torn out and rewritten from scratch, in my opinion, as its often far too restrictive and limiting. In a game which ought to be rife with interstellar intrigue, you cant make a deal with the devil or use the enemy of my enemy is my friend as a justification. If your morals and ethics arent perfectly well aligned, its difficult to really get much traction.

That in turn makes it difficult to break out of the familiar end game of grand empires butting heads in combat, smashing two huge Doom Stack fleets into one another in a decisive manner. The galactic crises still help to spice up the mid-end game to a certain degree, and the stories that you can explore are still enjoyable to me that said, Ive spent nowhere near as long with the game as some people while the Ascension Perks can give you new end goals to aim for, but I still find myself feeling that Im heading toward a kind of stalemate that can only be decided one way.

Utopia and Banks amount to a significant improvement to Stellaris that rewrites and overhauls a lot of the game for the better, adding yet more ways to try and build your empire. However, it also feels like Paradox are still just getting started with exploring everything that the game can be. It might take time for them to get there, but its a journey Im looking forward to taking with them.

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Stellaris: Utopia Brings Further Depths To Its Grand Galactic Strategy - TheSixthAxis

Its not about Croydon, its not about Brexit its about thuggery

As a Kurdish teenager recovers in hospital from a sickening attack that left him fighting for his life, the citizens of Croydon are trying to come to terms with what happened on Friday 31st March on the Shrublands estate. How could such a savage beating take place on our doorstep? Why Croydon? Why England? Why now?

Judging by vitriol spouted in much of the national press and on social media, this was bound to happen. What did we expect, living in such a violent, racist borough that shines like a beacon of Brexit-induced hate? If the attack itself wasnt disturbing enough, its been followed by an extraordinary outpouring of tasteless, unfounded comments, Croydon-bashing and political point-scoring that only served to highlight prejudices.

No sooner had police announced that this was being treated as a Croydon hate crime, then the likes of MP Diane Abbot were claiming that it was an inevitable result of Brexit. The insinuation was that this was an attack by Croydons racist thugs who want immigrants shipped out of the UK. As the fallout increased in the press, a quick search for #Croydon on Twitter that wonderful debating forum that much of the media now reprints as news revealed racism is well and truly alive in the UK, at least online.

The coverage implied the attack was the result of Croydons black gang culture

First, there were people screaming that Croydon is a hotbed of Brexit-voting yobs. They didnt mention colour, but the inference was there. Then, when the police published images of some of the suspects, the Brexiteers and Croydon haters were gleefully bleating that the attack was a symptom of Croydons violent black gang culture.

This horrible episode turned into an almighty attack on Croydon and its people, and a slanging match between the far right and the far left. And all this while, the young man at the centre of it all was lying in intensive care. Fortunately, as I write this, he is on his way to recovery.

What makes this appalling crime and the vitriol which followed so hard to understand is it doesnt fit the Croydon I know. This is a town and borough with an extremely diverse and growing population and a strong spirit, where people are generally warm, down to earth and accepting of one another. Croydon is not exactly the new utopia, but it is consistently and unfairly derided for problems shared by many urban areas across the UK.

The Financial Times says that this is the sort of place where this was bound to happen

The fact that this particular crime took place in Shrublands, a relatively green estate next to Addington golf course and bordered by suburban West Wickham and Shirley was all but lost in the ranting that followed the attack. It doesnt fit the narrative. Neither does the fact that absolutely nobody except those involved knows exactly what happened. The police investigation has barely begun.

A few weeks on, and the national media is beginning to cover the story in a bit more depth, in the way they do when they come to a place for five minutes and make disparaging remarks. The Financial Times this week even went to Shrublands, which it described as ragged. Commenting on a moment of silence held for the Kurdish refugee, the FT went on to say: Shrublands residents many wearing tracksuits, some drinking glared at the outsiders but kept their distance. The FT article, like many, basically says that this is the sort of place where this sort of thing was going to happen due to rising tensions between locals and outsiders. There may well be tensions in Shrublands, as there are in many areas of London and the UK, but this alone does not justify a brutal attack.

Like the FT, I have no idea what really happened that fateful evening or why, but I do know that this was an orgy of violence by what appears to have been a very angry mob. Could this have happened outside Croydon? Of course it could. Would it have prompted the same types of headlines and comments if it had happened in Clapham or anywhere else in south London? Do Croydon citizens really think it was a direct result of a referendum on leaving the EU?

Scum is the only thing we can say with certainty

The angry mob and a them and us mentality has always existed in this world and probably always will. Thankfully, it only occasionally rears its ugly head when people of similar violent persuasion come together at the same point in time and something triggers vile mob behaviour. Croydon MP Gavin Barwell described the culprits as scum. And hes right. It really is the only thing that we can say with certainty.

So lets try to put an end to the incessant Croydon bashing and political point scoring for a moment and wait for the police investigation to unfold. Hopefully, this will get to the bottom of what sparked such a disgusting attack. Then we can look at how we as a community, and as a country, can try to reduce the chances of this kind of attack happening again. Hopefully, the culprits will be given the sentence they deserve for the sake of the poor refugee who got caught up in an extreme example of mob behaviour in that most innocuous of circumstances: waiting for a London bus.

I'm not even a proper Croydoner. I moved here 16 years ago. Then I abandoned it for Marseille but something drew me back here last year. Maybe it was the banter. I write and edit online and print communications, I teach English to non-native speakers, and I drink lots of tea. I have a thing for Croydon, Marseille, Arsenal, architecture and bears.

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The Reker Ahmed attack was about mob violence - The Croydon Citizen

Home USA NYC Will Transform 30 Blocks into a Pedestrian Utopia For Earth Day

On April 22nd between the hours of 10AM and 4PM, New York City will be celebrating Earth Day by closing downover 30 blocks to cars, buses, and transportation.

Instead of the noise and pollution, peoplewill be able to amble throughthe core of the Big Apple onany street between Union Square and Times Square onpedestrian walkways lined with activities.

WATCH:This Pup Gives Hugs to Stressed Out New Yorkers on the Street

City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez said: Were showing New Yorkers the potential of a car-free Broadway and what open streets can look and feel like. Reducing car usage in our city can transform so much. It can help us to take advantage of space currently used for parking lots and gas stations; it can reduce traffic fatalities and injuries; it can make our city healthier and more breathable; and it can bring a newfound sense of calm to our bustling metropolis.

Weve seen countries around the world take this initiative to great heights and New York should be no different. If were going to craft a sustainable future for our city and our planet, cars will not be the answer and Earth Day is the best opportunity to make this point clear.

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NYC Will Transform 30 Blocks into a Pedestrian Utopia For Earth Day - Good News Network

Farmers market on the move Fort Worth Star Telegram ... former New Beginnings Church, 203 Smith St. With construction planned on the Pond Branch linear trail for that site, the market needed to find a new home. The Wesley Mission Center, which is also planning a move to the Dollar General/Utopia Fitness ...

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Farmers market on the move - Fort Worth Star Telegram