3.
Imaginary Realm: History, Memory, & Self
“Answer my prayer, God, and tell me, pitiable as I am, be pitiful to me and tell me this: did I have another period of life, which died and was succeeded by my infancy? Was this the period which I spent inside my mother’s womb,” (Augustine, Confessions, p. 22)
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Both Thomas More and his friend Desiderius Erasmus were humanists. Meaning specifically that they emphasized the dignity of Man and the power of Reason while remaining deeply committed to Christianity, and through all of his many successes—entering the service of King Henry VIII in 1518, becoming Chancellor in 1529—More remained a profoundly religious Catholic. Because he couldn’t escape his desire for a wife, More chose to become a “chaste husband rather than a licentious priest” but all the same longed for a Christian vita contemplativa from early youth, and throughout his life, More followed many of the ascetic practices of monks: rising early, fasting, engaging in prolonged prayer, and wearing a hair shirt. He also was famous for his immense poverty.
At the same time, the writings of he and his friend Erasmus were helping to break the hold of the strict religious orthodoxy that had constrained thought through the Middle Ages. He was enthralled by Hellenic culture, Aristophanes and Lucian. The front matter of the first edition of Utopia is full of teasing remarks about the relations of this island to Plato’s Republic, but More lived during the early years of the Protestant Reformation, and in his later life became a leader of the Counter-Reformation.
A lecturer on St. Augustine’s City of God, after the Lutheran conspiracy erupted over Europe More regretted much of what he had written as a younger man, including Utopia, and spent most of his time in the persecution of Protestants, stating that he would rather “burne them both [meaning Utopia and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly] wyth myne owne handes” than see any more harm come from them. In the England of his later years, More was a tireless persecutor of Protestants, though, paradoxically, one of the tenets of his Utopian society was religious toleration, and he himself was executed as a traitor in 1535 for refusing to swear an oath that would have signified his consent to England’s disavowal of the papacy. Perhaps a deeper understanding of the church’s history will help us understand More in greater detail.
Through the church’s early development we can see the curbing of the flesh in combination with the adoration of the divine. Saint Paul writes, “for I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh….I see in my members another Law at war with the Law in my mind….Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”[1] The informed understanding of both Judaism and ancient Greece was that sexuality was a potential demon in youth and had to be repressed until it could be harnessed by marriage so as to make it a productive force in the procreation of the species. The extremism of early Christianity was however unsettling to the government under which it found itself. Not only were the Christians militant at converting gentiles and in condemnation of the sexual act—not just as a possible defiler of the young but as defiling in its very essence—but they were also setting up study groups made up as much if not more so by young women as young men, and it was becoming as much a concern in any medium-sized Roman city that adolescent women would be converted as that they would be scourged. Tertullian writes, “One mighty deed alone was sufficient for our God—to bring freedom to the human person.”[2] This freedom in Christianity included women.
The message of early Christianity was that history had stopped (the ‘present age’ being the age of God’s reign on earth), that suffering could be transcended, that the world in which the individual lived, if abandoned would lead to a heaven on earth in which the person would live in perfect tranquillity. They denounced not only the necessity of marriage, but the very temporality of our existence, but just as Origen says “Do not think that just as the belly is made for food and food for the belly, that in the same way the body is made for intercourse….it was made that it should be a temple to the lord,” so too does Augustine, “despair at ever achieving chastity….presenting the power of indecent lust as so strong that neither reason could rule nor restrain it, nor the combined experience of the Apostles prove that it can ever be held at bay.” We have here not an unloosing but an attempt to control and contain. Freedom from temporality and history can be manifested only if you deny your animal element.
Now back to Thomas More.
Thomas More, as a humanist, hoped for a return to early Christian values. He chastised his flesh and was primarily concerned with the spiritual schooling of his contemporaries throughout his life. At first, playfully, with his Utopia, and later, brutal in his efforts to suppress what he viewed as heresies. What we see, with early Christian thought, the vision literature through Dante, and More is a dichotomy between physical and transcendental that informs every utopian discourse, even those like De Sade’s, that focus on an extreme emphasis of the physical rather than a retreat into the transcendental, ethereal, and fantastic—what is De Sade’s world if not the visceral hell of medieval vision literature brought into the everyday world? The eternal, imaginal, and ideal versus the temporal, real, and imperfect. All of which goes back to Plato’s ideal forms, as well as the Adamic myth. However, unlike Dante’s vision, with its ambiguity as to whether it’s real or artifice, More’s vision is very consciously and definitively unreal.
And from More on, this unreality would grow and develop. Perhaps most bizarrely in De Sade’s Justine or in Restif’s foot-fetish answer, Anti-Justine. For any utopian literature is dependent upon a system, both legal and psychological, which can either tend towards the idiosyncrasies of Restif or the uniformity of More.[3]
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These utopias—output of which really peaked in the 19th century—were both personal and political documents. They were (usually) sincere attempts to right the wrongs of society, but they also existed as imaginal spaces, like the CGI worlds of GTA are today. These are structural components in which the imagination can play.
That having been said, to varying degrees, every utopia has attempted to create a system wide enough to encompass all who live within it. However, these systems themselves can look pretty outlandish to modern eyes. For example, the more seriously intentioned, but equally sex-oriented Fourier and Saint-Simon—the latter forming a commune in the mid-nineteenth century where free love was openly practiced—and as for Fourier, Hakim Bey said it best: “In Fourier’s system of Harmony all creative activity including industry, craft, agriculture, etc. will arise from liberated passion—this is the famous theory of ‘attractive labor’. Fourier sexualizes work itself—the life of the Phalanstery is a continual orgy of intense feeling, intellection, & activity, a society of lovers & wild enthusiasts.”[4]
(Although it is true that most utopias are not quite so sexually minded, this optimistic view of humankind, that if society were better ordered than human beings would naturally be good, stands in direct contrast to the efforts of the early Christians to control the world of the flesh.)
“Thus it has happened that in alternating periods of agitation and calm, of good and evil, the total mass of the human species has moved ceaselessly toward its perfection,” Turgot wrote in his plan de deux discourse l’histoire universelle (p.285), and Condorcet once said, “We pass by imperceptible gradations from the brute to the savage to Euler and Newton,” (Oevres, VI 346). Condorcet and Turgot may both seem strange choices in a survey of utopian thought, as neither of them are penning an ideal society, but rather attempting to comprehend the histrionic move toward the ultimate society, and in so doing creating a sort of narrative of progress, which Condorcet at least places above liberty. Both lived in the second half of the eighteenth century, and did not live to see the flowering of utopian thought in the nineteenth, but both are important in framing the ideology of progress that came to define both the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit (1795) was perhaps the most influential formulation of the idea of progress ever written.
As I have stated previously, the static worldview of the early Christians transformed into a histrionic one with the Enlightenment—in part perhaps due to the re-evaluation and renewed popularity of hellenic culture and people like Hesiod. Science and technology will make life better the philosophes said, and this became a common assumption throughout Europe for the next 150 years. It was only as we entered the modern age, with its WWI and WWII, that the ideology of progress began to be displaced by an increasing uneasiness and ultimately terror at what science, technology, and civilization had wrought.
Utopian thinkers were the futurologists of their day, each one focusing on a single root problem that if solved would solve everything else. For example, capitalism, privacy, technology, government, aesthetics, sexual restraint, et cetera. Each utopia is particular, and it is specifically this specialization—as to vision and solution—that leads to each’s unreality, but these countless utopias were not merely political fantasies, but a politicized fantasy. They were not merely places outside of place, but an effort to transform our individual separate experience into something classifiable, to ultimately transform the useless mob into something more useful and a happier member of a now unified social framework.
An exploration of fantasy (as defined by Rabkin as a reversal of perceived reality, which all utopia does to various degrees) is also a deconstruction of our external perceptions, and a means to transform our conception of the world in which we live into an imminent reality, a reality that is in the process of becoming more real, or more true.[5] The real world is still to come. But what happens when this logic breaks down is that it’s replaced by the terror at the imminent end of the reality of the here-and-now. A politics of hope is replaced by a politics of terror. It is with Freud and Marx that this transition begins. Marx’s thought, which proved the last great utopian enterprise, leading to the birth of the totalitarian state, and Freud, who called into question the whole idea of an ideal society or idealized humans.
4.
This Place is Out of Place: Ideology in Practice
“The qualitative content of the numinous experience [the experience of the holy]…‘the mysterious’…in which it shows itself as something uniquely attractive and fascinating…and besides that in it which bewilders and confounds, he feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication; it is the Dyonisiac element in the numen,” (Rudolph Otto, The Concept of the Holy, p. 31).
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In their efforts to gain total control over their people, totalitarian states are indeed working to transform their populace into ideal citizens. This agenda is as impossible as the utopian projects it grew out of. Its power lies in its impossibility.
For it is through the expectation of the impossible that societies always maintain their control. From the theological: Be good and wait to be happy in the afterlife; to the secular humanist idea of progress: sacrifice so your children can have a better life; to the totalitarian progroms of today: you may be sacrificed for the good of the state at any moment. Hope for a future we will never see and fear of repercussions for no clear cause, but the problem comes when societal expectations lose this halo of impossibility to instead become mundane and incessantly flawed. For reality can never be anything but flawed.
There have been many “utopian experiments” in the twentieth century, most notably the Nazi and Communist, but the line between totalitarianism on the one hand the so-called free world has become an increasingly blurry one. Nations that began the twentieth century as ideology-in-practice, as in, the American Dream, or as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, are now incorporating aspects that formerly would have been sloughed off as alien and even evil as a core part of how they function and plan on functioning in the future. Communist China has begun a push to popularize the slogan, the Chinese Dream, in efforts to define themselves both in opposition to America (this “Chinese Dream” the CCP is pushing is collectivist as opposed to individualist, whereas instead of anyone being able to be whatever they want to be, instead it’s that whatever is good for China is good for me) while America is increasingly functions as an “enlightened despotism”.
From visions of heaven and hell to visions of the future and the past, the language of utopia has come to inform ideologies that are themselves increasingly a kind of totemization: “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “the land of the free” both work to blind a nation to its true face. It is a kind of political-realism black magic.
Or as Frank and Fritzie Manuel put it, “both late-twentieth-century communism and capitalism in their dreamworlds present the exciting prospect of societies eating their way to the kingdom of heaven on earth without surfeit,” (p.807).
Once again, it is the dual concepts of progress and redemption that fuel this mirage of the real, although more and more it is also a nightmare rhetoric, of what might happen if, and what those persons out there would do. Recently, for example, in Beijing, footage of a US journalist being beheaded has been placed on an on-going loop. We, as consumers were once taught that we were gods. Our dreams could come true if we had enough purchasing power or, as Ernest Becker says in his classic 1970’s examination into the human condition, The Denial of Death, “We are gods with anuses.” Sound familiar?
Becker utilizes a very Freudian perspective of the human condition throughout his work, and in a sense, the 20th century could be said to be defined by these two ideas, of Freud and Marx, of worms and monsters. The political ideologies of the aforementioned totalitarian regimes turned society into monsters (Hitler, Stalin) who want to play God and their victims, and advertising in the free market and the ideology behind it (subliminal advertising was invented by Edward Bernays, Freud’s American advertising exec nephew) reduced the human person into a simple worm in its efforts to simply and clinically categorize the totality of the human experience, leaving the ‘mystery’ of which Otto wrote far far behind. For Freud’s focus was always on the anus and never on the godlike aspects of humankind. The secret is that there will always be a ‘mystery’ which cannot be categorized.
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There will always be something untouchable, no matter how effective and invasive the techniques of subversion and control become. “CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated,” (T.A.Z.).
The clash between these two forces—between this mysterious me and the ideologies of these many political entities—is it not unlike the clash between a language tied to “reality” and a language that deceives? Is it not unlike the difference between a language that creates and one that simply shames? We are all the philosopher-kings and all we need to do is see and the structural constraints of these ever-evolving invisible prisons will become the nothings they always were.
The ideas that inform our world are the snake, and we are all perpetually biting into the same apple every moment of every day. The concept of individuation becomes the concept of the niche market, and the idea of heaven on earth becomes the idea of the good life. Everything but this very reduced vision of the universe is unscientific and therefore fantasy. The vision of the contemporary age becomes increasingly myopic as civilization’s prospects become increasingly more dire, and our vision of ourselves also becomes increasingly more reductionist, from Freud to pharmacology, from Marx to marketing.
But the mystery remains and always will. There are still contemporary Calvino’s exploring their Invisible Cities and Bey’s “wild children” are still running rampant in the post-Situationist digital universe. There are always cracks in the system, even when those cracks are continually being stopped up with the red tape of the ruling classes.
My friend, Clarke Cooper has recently written a booklength essay on this topic entitled, The Indifference Engine, the argument of which is that we are currently living in a neo-totalitarian state, that the free market itself is neo-totalitarian in the sense that it also works to change the persons living in any society within which it functions, but not through fear and not with any goal in mind, but simply because in a free market only that which can be commodified has value, and all other aspects of ourselves are ignored as ephemeral and imaginary. That which is real is only that which can be bought and sold.
The creation of realism, both in its narrative and socio-political elements, is the manner we see ourselves and the manner we present the world as it is, was, and will be. This narrowed scope is a result of the ongoing and continual eating of further and deeper into the tree of knowledge, and the ongoing and repeated discovery of fire. From imaginal to imagined, from allegorical vision to literalist vision to a visionless present involving disposable persons in a disposable economy we all know to be wrong-headed and ridiculous, yet, with no other clearly viable alternative, our ever-narrowing ideologies remain stubbornly in place as culture drives onward and ever closer to its always imminent collapse.
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1. Romans 7:18, 23 – 24.
2. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 1.17.
3. All historical information concerning utopias from More to the present day taken from Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World;Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
4. In The Lemonade Ocean & Modern Times.
5. Eric Rabkin. The Fantastic in Literature; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
