Introduction: Utopia and dystopia beyond space and time

Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 1-17

  Gordin, Michael D ^a   Tilley, Helen ^b   Prakash, Gyan ^c  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^c NONE

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EID: 84890781196     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Editorial

References (42)

1. See, for example, the collected utopias from antiquity to the present gathered in The Utopia Reader, ed. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York University Press, 1999). On the literary traditions, see Gary Saul Morson, Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981);
2. Peter Edgerly Firchow, Modern Utopian Fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007).
3. See also Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007)
4. Patrick Parrinder, ed., Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
5. For two recent analyses of dystopia, see Thomas Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000);
6. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, eds., Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2003).
7. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) is a classic example of the kind of dystopic imagination we describe here. The film places viewers directly in a mechanistic utopia gone mad and alerts us of the danger of apocalypse if we do not pay heed. Indeed, only total destruction, the film suggests, can provide a new beginning.
8. There are, as always, very valuable exceptions to a statement like this one. See, for example, Mark Featherstone, Tocqueville's Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought (New York: Routledge, 2008);
9. Jaap Verheul, ed., Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse: Utopia and Dystopia in American Culture (Amsterdam:VU University Press, 2004);
10. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Nowotny, eds., Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1984).
11. For some more general treatments, see J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society:A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
12. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Philip Allan, 1990);
13. Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999);
14. Howard P. Segal, Technology and Utopia (Washington, DC:Society for the History of Technology, 2006);
15. Phillip E. Wegner, Imaginary Communities:Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
16. Such a mood has even hit literary scholarship: Nicholas Spencer, After Utopia:The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth-Century American Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
17. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998);
18. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukás to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
19. Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (New York: Methuen, 1987);
20. Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000);
21. Tania Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). For an implicit rejoinder to at least some of these trends, see Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
22. For a recent example, see Jack Lawrence Luzkow, What's Left? Marxism, Utopianism, and the Revolt against History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006).
23. This concept appears in many places in Foucault's writings, but perhaps most powerfully in his analysis of epistemes in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994).
24. This is, in the end, one of the crucial insights of the chapters on Marx in the classic exploration of utopian socialism: Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940).
25. The notion of practice we deploy here derives mostly from the science-studies literature. For an introduction, see Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices:Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions (London: Polity, 1994).
26. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1991 [1929]), 40, emphasis in original. This point is further elaborated, in explicit contrast to the totemic intellectual style of analyzing utopias (and invoking Thomas More), on pp. 200-201.
27. For an earlier expression, see Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 [1918]).
28. A few examples in critical theory include Frederick Engels's Dialectics of Nature, trans. and ed. Clemens Dutt with a preface by J.B.S. Haldane (New York: International Publishers, 1940 [1898]);
29. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972);
30. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: N.L.B., 1971);
31. William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (New York: Braziller, 1972);
32. Jay, Marxism and Totality. Historians of the life and environmental sciences explore related dimensions of our understanding of anima, as do those environmental and medical historians who consider nature's agency. These references are too numerous to list, but for a few early works see William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976);
33. Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: The Roots of Ecology (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1977);
34. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). More recently, historians of empire and science have taken up these themes as well, including Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
35. Other diseases have been brought close to zero incidence, such as polio, but several thousand cases per year persist. See Harry Hull and Bruce Aylward, "Progress towards Global Polio Eradication," Vaccine 19 (2001): 4378-84.
36. Donald A. Henderson et al., "Smallpox as a Biological Weapon: Medical and Public Health Management," Journal of the American Medical Association 281, no. 22 (1999): 2127-37.
37. Although, again, there are several sources for our thinking here, we owe certain debts to intellectual historians concerned with technics and technology; a classic here would be Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934).
38. This has become an increasingly popular theme; see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
39. See, for example, among many such recent titles, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
40. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
41. Adam Zagajewski, "Old Marx," New Yorker, 21 January 2008. This picture is interestingly related to the classic (and heavily contested) picture of Marx-and utopian socialism in general-in Wilson's To the Finland Station.
42. See, for example, the conjunction of urban planning and environmental constraints represented by the chapters in The Nature of Cities, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006). The vast (and growing) literature on environmental history speaks to these issues again and again.