Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher
Norman Geras’ article on utopia is insightful, humane and thought-provoking. It converges upon the “revival of utopian thinking” called for by figures such as Fredric Jameson, who proposes utopian thought as the antidote to the crisis of historical imagination created by postmodern culture. There is a chain of associations at work in this Left discourse: social(ist) alternatives, historical imagination, utopian thinking. Frequently, the links in the chain are collapsed into a single “indivisible” assertion that while socialism seems utopian today, this “utopia” is the necessary condition of possibility for critical thought.
This confuses utopia as ideal goal with “utopia” used ironically as a rhetorical device in the ideological struggle. When Geras states that “we should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians,” the word is being used in the second sense: if demanding the minimal conditions for human decency and ecological survival is “utopian,” then “utopians” we shall be. “Utopia” in this sense is a placemarker for (morally and historically) “necessary,” at that moment when necessity seems to be an impossibility. In this sense, I think we can without reservation endorse the call for utopian thinking.
This, however, is only a secondary employment of the word. In its main meaning, utopia stands for a timeless “nowhere” of human and natural fullness, for a vision of achieved social and ecological harmony. Secular moderns all, we have read Freud and instantly recognise the basic configuration of the unconscious, which “knows no history” and is located in an “Other scene,” another place. Utopia, in short, designates the existence of an indestructible wish, expressed socially as a fantasy of social reconciliation. Now, the interesting thing about the research on hope, utopian vision and unconscious human desire - thinking of classics such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism and Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope - is that the utopian longing is perennial, virtually identical throughout history and almost indefatigable. Indeed, Primo Levi’s books about concentration camps suggest that the moment of the extinguishing of hope is the moment of the onset of death: a society that had truly abandoned utopian thought would be a society gripped by a collective will to self-destruction - and this means not the everyday incremental onset of ecological crisis or social disruption, but something more on the lines of Germany towards the end of the Second World War. The description of utopian thinking as a social fantasy, therefore, is a technical (psychoanalytic) designation, and no slight or sneer. In this sense, utopian thinking is the mainspring of critical thought. It is our true “rock of faith” and the “light” that sustains us even through empirical defeat.
It is just that, if this is true, that a call for utopian thinking alone is strictly meaningless. The sustaining unconscious core of Islamic fundamentalism, the ideology of the Socialist Equity Party and the speeches of Martin Luther King is the same: the utopian wish for plenitude. Nothing else is capable (as the above literature on hope demonstrates amply) of sustaining heroic sacrifice and engendering euphoric states in victory. The real question is: how is this unconscious fantasy articulated with conscious ideological elements? In the “utopian” discourse of the Left, it is articulated as a conscious element with the concept of historical imagination and the ensemble of concepts that constitute the socialist Ideal. Not only will the conscious collocation of utopia with other ideological elements (ideologemes, hereafter) not move any mountains (this is an artificial, engineered utopia that relies, in reality, on the reactivation of a formerly held, real utopian thought, namely, the promise of communism), but the mere placement of “utopia” between historical imagination and the socialist ideal is not sufficient for it to play the hoped for mediating role.
My thesis: the discourse of socialist “utopianism” is actually addressed primarily to the established Left. Its message: don’t lose hope now. Yet precisely as an effort to reactivate an unconscious wish, it fails. It fails for two reasons. In psychoanalytic terms, for those losing hope in socialism and experiencing the melancholy associated with the work of mourning, the unconscious energy that sustained their commitment to socialism is being displaced onto other possible objects of affection (social justice, equality, self-advancement, liberal democracy, whatever). Socialism is - as soon as the melancholy hits - effectively dead for them. The only way the appeal could work would be to articulate socialism with some of these possible alternative ideals (by demonstrating that “all along” socialism “really meant” x, y or z). Otherwise, it is a waste of time, which just happens to function as a convenient excuse for maintaining positions that are rationally indefensible.
This connects with the second reason that the appeal of socialist “utopianism” is nugatory. Socialism is also “scientific socialism” - that is, it is not just a set of ideologemes (equality, democracy, liberty, solidarity) but also an impersonal analysis of capitalist social formations. A commitment to socialism is, of course, sustained by a burning sense of injustice and an imperative desire to participate in emancipatory struggles. But it involves at the same time a commitment to the analytical norms of Western science - which are not at all the thing caricatured by Western Marxists such as Marcuse or trumpeted by anti-communists such as Popper. There is a permanent disjunction between the intellectually valid but “alienating” findings of science (Marx: in capitalist economics, persons appear as mere bearers of abstract economic functions) and the inspirational vision of communist society (the riddle of history solved, and all that). This is the line that will forever divide Marx from Hegel: history is not reducible to the development of the self-interpretation of human subjects, but involves the impersonal forces of economics as its irreducible substructure. Richard Feynman (the Nobel laureate physicist) somewhere says that anyone who tells you they understand quantum mechanics is bluffing. The equations are rational and empirically demonstrable, but make no common sense. Quantum mechanics is not exceptional in this. The basic scientific move since the Copernican revolution has been the demonstration that everyday life is lived in the illusory immediacy of a self-evident universe of sensorily given meaningful referents - from which, actually, no valid scientific laws can be directly inferred whatsoever. Let me suggest the following (modern, Kantian) question for the advocates of “socialist utopianism":
This is the heart of the problem. The socialist ideal no longer seems rational - because of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, because of the historical distance between us and the nineteenth century, because it is impossible to rationally accept the “betrayal” theory of political history that makes a pristine socialism the “road not taken”. The crisis of historical imagination concerns, most directly, the forms of the transition to socialism, the agencies that might make this transition possible and the political strategies that might be capable of actually carrying out this agenda, and not the possibility of a world without money or the state. Most normal people cannot imagine socialism because the Left cannot imagine a scenario for the transition to socialism that might meet the scientific norms set by historical materialism itself.
For this task, the discourse of “socialist utopianism” functions as an evasion. The psychological economy involved is relatively clear. Consideration of the transition period involves an evaluation of the twentieth century, a searching investigation of the legacy of Marxian theory and a demonstration that the programme of scientific socialism retains its validity and relevance today. This is a massive, daunting task. It almost certainly involves the rejection of some cherished Marxian ideas and a significant collective project, probably spanning an entire generation and including historical experience in mass struggle as well as theoretical research. How much easier to declare the entire structure sound and wait for the next wave.
It functions as an evasion in a second, purely utopian sense, too. Marx declares that communism is the “riddle of history solved” (not that historical struggles represent the solving of historical questions - a tautology - but the finalist declaration of a solution, past tense). This relies for its plausibility on its articulation with the theory of historical necessity. Marxism presents the enigma of an explicit doctrine of historical necessity that is not teleological (the end is not implicitly present in the beginning as its secret goal) but on the contrary, evolutionary in the accepted scientific sense of the word, yet which functioned teleologically because it was articulated with the promise of a solution to the “riddle of history” in the form of communism as the advent of the universal individual in a fully reconciled society. Marxism as a discursive ensemble therefore managed to combine a scientific theory of history with the traces of a providential philosophy of history. This is neither reprehensible, nor some kind of slander - merely historical. Historical in precisely the sense that it is no longer contemporary. It is exactly this utopian vision that we find impossible to believe today.
The historical master narrative about original unity, subsequent alienation and the final recovery of humanity’s alienated essence bears the stamp of theology. This is Marx at his most Hegelian - that is, most idealist and metaphysical. The concept of communism as the unity of essence and existence means that humanity assumes the infinite powers of the divinity. In philosophical terms, only a completely necessary being can unite existence and essence (the essence of this being necessarily entails its existence) - meaning that this being must be self-caused. This being is of course God, for only God is a self-caused being whose essence entails their existence. Finite humanity is contingent in relation to its essence: as a finite (limited and mortal being), the human being logically might not be in relation to its essence (however conceived, except as divine) - its existence is threatened, it might become extinct, individual members of the species certainly do die and are annihilated, and so forth. With Feuerbach, we can certainly suppose that the attributes of God represent an alienated (externalised and objectified) idealisation of human powers. The inverse does not hold: “God” is an alienated (externalised and objectified) idealisation of human powers, not a simple case of misrecognition.
Now, Marx might have held that the ideal of communism functioned as a regulative idea, that is, as an ideal unity for the ensemble of practical socialist policies that can never make an appearance in the empirical world ... but he almost certainly did not. Nevertheless, at least Marx insisted on the hypothetical character of the scattered deductions regarding communism (universal individual, withering of the state, norms of distribution). To begin making inferences regarding actual historical events based on these hypothetical deductions is not acceptable as a procedure, I believe.