Spatial Modernities

Geography, Narrative, Imaginaries

Johannes Riquet, Elizabeth Kollmann, Johannes Riquet, Elizabeth Kollmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351396868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays offers a series of reflections on the specific literary and cultural forms that can be seen as the product of modernity's spatial transformations, which have taken on new urgency in today's world of ever increasing mobility and global networks. The book offers a broad perspective on the narrative and poetic dimensions of the modern discourses and imaginaries that have shaped our current geographical sensibilities. In the early twenty-first century, we are still grappling with the spatial effects of 'early' and 'high' modern developments, and the contemporary crises revolving around political boundaries and geopolitical orders in many parts of the world have intensified spatial anxieties. They call for a sustained analysis of individual perceptions, cultural constructions and political implications of spatial processes, movements and relations.

The contributors of this book focus both on the spatial orders of modernity and on the various dynamic processes that have shaped our engagement with modern space.

Part I
Mapping Modernity

1 In the Suburbs of Amaurotum

Fantasy, Utopia and Literary Cartography*

Robert T. Tally

Utopiae Insulae Figura, an illustration included in the original 1516 publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, depicts the form of More’s fanciful but ideal nation-state. In this woodcut, Utopia’s capital city, Amaurotum, is placed in a suitably central position, but even more prominent in the foregrounding is a ship at anchor, presumably the one that brought Raphael Hythlodaeus to the island. A sailor stands on the deck and appears to be gazing off at the Utopian landscape, and one could argue that this figure represents the position of More’s own readers, who vicariously take part in a travel narrative, exploring the spaces of this strange country.¹ It is a peculiarly modern image, and the careful ordering of its elements reflects the rational order of Utopian society, which in turn discloses a perhaps unconscious desire for order, symmetry and reason in early modern European societies as well. The mere historical and geographical accident of Hythlodaeus’s discovery of Utopia is duly compensated for in the methodical, logical and rational organization of the society. More’s Utopia supplies a fantastic vision of how a society can reorganize itself, spatially and socially, as a thoroughly modern state.

Utopia, as well as the genre it helped to establish and the mode of thought it exemplifies and popularized, represents a critical node at which conceptions of fantasy, spatiality and modernity intersect. In this vision of the utopian place (or no-place),² More enacts a reorganization of social spaces that anticipates the changing spatiality of the Baroque epoch and the project of Enlightenment rationality, thus forming a certain image of modern social organization. If, as Phillip E. Wegner has convincingly argued in Imaginary Communities (2002), utopia is inextricably tied to the spatial histories of modernity, then More’s literary cartography of the ideal insula might be seen as a prototype for the imaginary maps of modern societies. These are fundamentally fantastic, at least as much as the imaginary community of Utopia is, since they are both fictional and imaginary. However, the term fantasy has often been freighted with unfavourable associations and must overcome critiques from at least two fronts: the somewhat scientific or philosophical bias towards a kind of narrative realism, on the one hand, and the politically charged critique of fantasy as an escapist genre, on the other. Traditionally, the critical discourse of modernity has envisioned a demystification of the world, such that the repression or elimination of those elements deemed fantastic has appeared to be almost an imperative of a distinctly modern world view, as in that archetypical narrative of Western modernity, Don Quixote, where the fantasies promulgated by chivalric romances and embraced as facts by the mad knight are repeatedly and humorously shown to be false in the face of an all-too-realistic real world. But, because all utopias are necessarily always fantastic, inasmuch as they project an entirely imaginary and by definition not (or not yet) real place, utopian discourse has itself at various times been dismissed as unrealistic, impractical or romantic, perhaps most famously by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. From the perspective of a sober realism, both works of fantasy and utopia might be dismissed as fanciful, if not childish or silly. Yet a number of anti-fantasy critics have embraced utopia, granted special status to this particular form of fantasy, owing to its cognitive, quasi-scientific projection of a rational order.³ In this view, utopia is the progressive, future-oriented and modern genre or mode par excellence, while fantasy appears as backward-looking, nostalgic or anti-modern.

However, viewed from the perspective of a longue durée, the experience of modernity has also been imbued with a profoundly fantastic content, whether in the sense of a utopian projection of idealized societies, or later by a sort of Gothic return of the repressed (perhaps best emblematized by Goya’s famous “Sleep of Reason”), the speculative projection of alternative futures or places in what emerges as the genre of science fiction, or the historical vision of radically different pasts or presents in the fantasy genre. The dialectic of mimesis and fantasy in literature, as Kathryn Hume has analyzed in some detail, does not resolve itself as a simple victory for one mode or the other, but both continue to inform works of the imagination (see Hume 1984). This dialectic has undoubtedly played itself out in narrative throughout history, but many scholars have observed an increasing tendency towards the fantastic in the past century, as even the most high-minded of serious literature (such as Ulysses or One Hundred Years of Solitude) has drawn upon myth, magic or other apparently unrealistic modes of discourse in their production. Although readers and scholars differ as to the merits of fantasy as a literary genre, there is little question that, as Tom Shippey has put it, “[t]he dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic” (2000, vii). Between More’s Utopia of the early sixteenth century and what China Miéville has characterized as the literature of estrangement in the twenty-first century (see Crown 2011), a persistent if discontinuous line of fantastic thought runs through modern literary history.

Realism itself, one could argue, is not exempt from fantasy’s influence. Even for those whose aim is to produce a pragmatic and realistic representation of the people, events and spaces under consideration in a given work, the fantastic mode has become a necessary part of any literary cartography. If narratives are among the principal means by which writers and readers project imaginary maps of their world, these may or may not also be utopian, and the degree to which their representational techniques may be deemed realistic or unrealistic may vary wildly from work to work. However, the basic grounding in a certain mode of alterity makes possible the innovative and critical apprehension of reality itself, as I discuss below. Unlike in More’s canonical version or even in the modern utopias of the industrial age (such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere or H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia), the utopian imagination in the age of globalization is not concerned with discovering a hidden island or future ideal state in the world; rather, it involves a figurative projection and representation of the world itself. Yet these earlier versions share with the more recent productions a fundamentally fantastic approach to the reality they seek simultaneously to represent and to transform. Utopias such as More’s, then, might be said to provide fantastic maps in which the given social system’s other spaces – those liminal and hybrid zones in which the strange, seemingly fantastic, but possibly liberating elements of this world make themselves visible – may be discerned. No less than a writer interested in a realistic depiction of the society in which the narrative takes place, the utopian or fantasist addresses the condition of the ‘real’ world, but does so while thinking that the improbable or impossible might be true. In these otherworldly spaces, the radical alterity associated with the fantastic mode establishes a conceptual and affective break with the present state of things. The city of Amaurotum, whose name is etymologically suggestive of shadows or dreams,⁴ offers one kind of fantasy for imagining the social spaces of modernity, but in the mist-enveloped realms of fantasy, we may discover some of modernity’s other spaces as well.

Utopian Spatiality

More’s fictional Utopia establishes an ideal image of how social spaces are to be organized in a modern nation-state. Among the many marvellous scientific and social achievements in this country that is at once a no-place (ou-topos) and a good place (eu-topos), urban planning must be counted near the top. “There are fifty-four splendid big towns on the island, all with the same language, laws, customs and institutions. They’re all built on the same plan, and, so far as the sites will allow, they all look exactly alike” (More 2003, 50). Such standardization of the Utopian urban space is part of what makes it utopian:

But let me tell you some more about the towns. Well, when you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen all of them, for they are as nearly identical as local conditions will permit. So I’ll just give you one example – it doesn’t matter which. However, the obvious choice is Amaurotum.

(50, translation modified)

The centrality of this imaginary city and its role in the idealized state accord it some privilege in the world of imaginary places. The fantastic metropolis of Amaurotum appears as a representative space of modernity.

In projecting this rational, standardized space of the capital city, More and the utopians who followed in his wake anticipate the massive social and spatial transformations associated with the emergence of the modern nation-state. The rationalization of social space he envisions partakes of the same sorts of revolutionary spatial transformations that have been famously described and analyzed in Michel Foucault’s archaeologies of the medical “gaze” or genealogy of disciplinary societies. Sounding a good deal more ominous than the utopians, Foucault describes the “disciplinary mechanism” that this political reorganization of social space establishes:

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.

(1977, 197)

The plague-stricken, late seventeenth-century society Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish would seem to be rather far removed from the humanistic ideals of More’s Utopia, and yet Foucault concludes that “[t]he plague-stricken town […] is the utopia of the perfectly governed city” (1977, 198). In Foucault, the shadows of Amaurotum appear a good deal darker.

More’s idealized description of the social ordering of Utopia anticipates the revolutionary reorganizations of power and knowledge in the Enlightenment.⁵ This new spatial order of the modern urban geography, which increasingly extends its conceptual reach to the national and international spatio-political ensembles as well, has been historically associated with a philosophical discourse of modernity connected to the multimodal phenomenon of Aufklärung, which for Immanuel Kant entailed mankind’s emancipation from a childish or minor status and which itself cannot be wholly separated from the material basis in the transformations of political economy or, in other words, the capitalist mode of production (Kant 1963, 3).⁶ The capitalist reorganization of time had a tendency to spatialize the temporal mode through what Marx understood as the fetishism of the commodity, in which (subjective) labour time congealed into the (objective) form of the physical commodity. “Thus,” according to Georg Lukács in his famous meditation on reification, “time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified human personality): in short, it becomes space” (1971a, 90). From a more general, philosophical point of view, the Enlightenment project is also characterized by a sort of spatialization of experience, such that every aspect of human and inhuman existence could somehow be ordered into a rational and orderly diagram.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1987) notoriously observed that the crucial aspect of Enlightenment rationality was the meticulous coordination and classification of the elements of existence, which extends to its apprehension of geographical space, obviously, in rationalizing the spaces of the world with new geometric and geographic precision. But it also tends to spatialize knowledge itself, making everything increasingly measurable and mappable. Referring the bizarrely resonant conceptual parallels between Kant’s transcendental aesthetic and the Marquis de Sade’s gymnastic sexual concatenations, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that “[w]hat Kant grounded transcendentally, the affinity of knowledge and planning, which impressed the stamp of inescapable expediency on every aspect of a bourgeois existence that was wholly rationalized, even in every breathing-space, Sade realized empirically” (1987, 88). Not only space but all human activity becomes measurable, quantifiable and ordered, such that even the extravaganzas of Sadean pornography can appear as dully categorical as the periodic table of elements. But, in terms of the Enlightenment’s great modern injunction – Sapere aude – enunciated by Kant himself in his answer to the question, “What is Enlightenment?” (1963), such drily methodical ordering is a sign of mankind’s maturity (3). It is evidence that humankind, having overcome the chimeras of superstition and affiliated phantasmagoria, can now embrace the coolly rational understanding of the world. This is itself a utopian vision, reflecting the aspirations of a rationalist thinker whose optimism with respect to mankind’s self-emancipation from religious or political charlatans would be sorely tested in the coming years and centuries.

More’s perfectly laid out social spaces and standardized cities, the Baroque reorganization of social space in terms of mathematical precision or the Cartesian grid, the ordering of spaces according to the exigencies of a disciplinary society à la Foucault’s genealogy of power, the transformation of time and experience into a spatial framework in a capitalist mode of production, the Enlightenment project of rationalization and the desacralization of the world – all of these are themselves the real-world results of what may well be considered, ironically or otherwise, a fantastic mode of thought. The dream of a perfectly rational organization of social space, like utopia itself, is after all a fantasy, and the utopian philosophical order, political policies, economic processes or urban planning that attempt to realize these fantasies are, in some ways, also fantastic. The literary or figurative mappings produced by such processes disclose fantastic spaces.

The paradigm shifts associated with the advent of a modern social organization require the imaginative projection of an almost mathematical order that is quite unreal, bringing the chaotic and vicissitudinous elements of nature, culture and society into an orderly whole that cannot but be artificial. The utopian project of modern philosophy and science is to imagine an altern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Framing the Debate: Spatial Modernities, Travelling Narratives
• PART I Mapping Modernity
• PART II Island Spaces
• PART III Shorelines/Borderlines
• PART IV Modernity on the Move
• PART V Late Modernity and the Spatialized Self
• Index