About "Utopoia"

Greek ou+topos (No-place)

Parerga: eutopia

Greek: eu+topos (good-place)

Utopia vs. utopian(thinking)

A narrative literary genre vs. a field of political-social theory, based on didactic optimism, which believes in potential ameliorating of the human race (political philosophy)

“Utopian” may imply impossibility. Eg. Utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen) vs. scientific socialism

Utopian communities

-Is it utopian if it works?

Most intention communities per capita: Israel, Australia

Utopia, Australia, since 1976, mostly indigenous artistic centre, 1000 people in 1000km^2 (seemingly isolated, actually embedded in global economy)

-A founding gesture?

Name, but not the genre? (Eg. Plato, Republic、Aristophanes, Assemblywomen)

-A perfect state?

Slavery, panoptic state (passport needed for inner travels), patriarchy

Utopia vs. golden age

Garden of Eden, Arcadia, the island of the blest, the land of Cockaygne etc. have non-western parallels: e.g. Tokoyo no kuni.

Difference: a utopia lacks transcendental elements. It depends on human political organization. Eg. China, Confucianism, Datong.

Travelogue structure

A traveler reaches the ideal foreign land, is given a guided tour, returns to tell about the experiences.

Hythlodaeus is the prototype, 5 years in Utopia. The journey is not important in a real utopia. Not the adventures but the political-intellectual, didactic content.

Test example: Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)

Renaissance utopia

Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun (1602)

A global theocracy (community of goods and women, religious heterodoxy)

Imprisoned by the Inquisition for heresy (and revolutionary activities)

Anti-utopia

Synonymous with satirical utopia.

A humorous critique of utopian thinking with a pessimistic view of human beings. Also a critique or the present society.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

Euchronia

Greek: eu+kronos (good-time)

After the great discoveris, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One (1771)

The narrator sleeps for 700 years

Time-travelogue

Somatopia/Pornotopia

A Pornographic[1] text that presents female body as a site of male pleasure, a utopian sexual landscape.

Samuel Cock, A Voyage to Lethe (1741)

Thomas Stretser, A New Description of Merryland (1741)

Same language for political imperialism and sexual conquest.

In Cock, Charming Sally is the name of the ship. “all who knew any thing of a ship, was ambitious of sailing in her”(11).

Stretser:”a pleasant Mount called MNSVNRS” “overlooks the whole country; and…round the Borders of Merryland is a spacious Forest which…seems to have been preserved for the Pleasure of Variety, and Diversion or Hunting”(17).

Robert Burns (1759-1796),”Botany Bay”

But this l deny in terms homely and blunt,

For Botany Bay is the spot we call cunt.

Our ancestor Adam, ’tis past any doubt,

Was the famous Columbus that found the spot out

“the assumption that the ‘natives’ don’t know what to do with the land that Providence has unfairly bestowed upon them, and that superior races are therefore entitled to take over” (Robert M. Adams)

Imperialist rape fantasy: a forcefully raped woman will admire the manhood, just like the vanquished native will accept the colonizer’s superiority.

Dystopia

“It is perhaps too complimentary to call the Utopians, they ought rather to be called dystopians or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be predictable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be predictable.”——John Stuart Mill,1868

Utopian novel

19th century: the triumph of the novel

The novel incorporates the utopia

Dystopian novel seems a subcategory of the utopian novel.

The great dystopian tradition

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937), We (1921,first published in 1924, New York)

Aldous Huxiey (1894-1963), Brave New World (1932)

George Orwell (1903-1950), Nineteen eighty-four (1949)

An early dystopian turn?

H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)

World state, Samurais, gender and racial equality, four mental types, no labour

Huxley, Brave New World (1932), Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Original plan: anti-utopia, a parody of Wells

Americanisation (Ford)

The same: meritocratic caste society, prison islands for deviants (the Cyprus experiment of exclusively alpha society)

Different: Reservation (no motivation for those)

Soma, genetic design, uninhibited but sterile sex, no art

Another typology

Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky (Bolder: Westview,2000)

Dystopian (novel) scheme

The story line develops around an alienated protagonist as he begins to recognize the situation for what it really is and thus to trace the relationship between individual experience and the operation of the entire system.

Ending A: The power structure crushes the resistant dissenter

Ending B: The misfit finds allies.

Option for ending B: Another defeat; a resistant enclave; a liberated zone; a political movement: some hope on the horizon

Science fiction

An educated guess about the future, technical focus, not infrequently in the romance genre.

Distant, alternate realities, Ursula K. LeGuin usually compare different societies on different planets (The Unpossessed)

Sci-fi vs. Fantasy: China Mieville on metropolitan spaces (Perdido Street Station, The City and the City)

Dystopian turn around 1960.

Also interrogating the economic and cultural space

Film?

Anthony Bugess, A Clockwork Orange

Britain: Heinemann (21 chapters) 1962

USA: Norton (20 chapters) 1963

USA: Norton (21 chapters) 1987

Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, 1971

The Matrix (1999)

Philosophical background: Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Hilary Putnam, Brains in a vat

The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood (1985)

Film 1990

Opera 2000

Television series 2017-

Blade Runner

Philip K, Dick (1928-82), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1962)

Ridley Scott, 1982

Director’s cut, 1991

“If only you could see what l have seen with your eyes”

Cyberpunk?

Combination of lowlife and high tech

AI, cybernetics, and the breakdown of social order

William Gibson, Sprawl trilogy

Neuromancer (1984)

Count Zero (1986)

Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

Charles Stross, Accelerando (2005)

Global warming novels (Cli-fi)

Kim Steanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain (2004)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

[1] Pornotopia is a term coined by the critic Steven Marcus to describe the idealised, imaginative space of pornography, Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (1971) p. 272-6 and used more broadly to describe a fantasy state dominated by universal sexual activity.