Plea for "poetic" as opposed to blueprinting utopianism

[applegrove]

Book Review:

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050613&s=eagleton

Just My Imagination
by TERRY EAGLETON



Utopias are not always pleasant places to inhabit. An English fantasy of 1848, Charles Rowcroft's The Triumph of Woman: A Christmas Story, portrays a utopian regime full of wholesome puddings and a glorious one person per pew in church. In Sarah Scott's A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), the ideal world is an English country mansion in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the shrubberies. Douglas Jerrold's The Chronicles of Clovernook (1846), an insufferably smug tale in which the narrator becomes particularly excited at the prospect of little boys tearing their trousers, enthuses over an imaginary society that still has taxes, prisons and poverty.

Most utopias, as Russell Jacoby recognizes in his absorbing new study, Picture Imperfect, are odorless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and sensible, in which the natives chat for hours about the splendid efficiency of their sanitary arrangements. Alternative social universes tend to be thinly disguised versions of our own--rather as aliens, give or take a limb or two, are seldom all that different from Donald Rumsfeld or Tony Blair. The real aliens are those who are squatting in our laps right now, just as the true utopia must necessarily beggar our speech. To portray the future in the language of the present is inevitably to betray it. "The worst is not," remarks a character in King Lear, "so long as we can say, 'This is the worst'"; and what goes for the worst also goes for the best. Anything we can speak of must by definition fall short of the otherness we desire. So perhaps it is better to imagine the future only negatively, as Kant thought that we could catch a glimpse of infinity only by pressing against the limits of the mind and watching them warp and buckle. For his part, Jacoby wants a utopian thought that "pines for the future but does not map it out."

For Theodor Adorno, this negative utopia is known as art. For others, the only true image of the future is the failure of the present. Or, for that matter, the failure of the past. As Walter Benjamin reminded us, it is memories of enslaved ancestors, not dreams of liberated grandchildren, that drive men and women to revolt. To avoid some cheap leftist triumphalism, we must move backward into the future with our eyes fixed mournfully on that great heap of wreckage that is the past. Otherwise we are merely callow modernizers or cavalier avant-gardists, who in seeking to eradicate the past will discover that it returns with a vengeance to plague us."

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