Becoming Utopian

The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

Tom Moylan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350133358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

A dream of a better world is a powerful human force that inspires activists, artists, and citizens alike. In this book Tom Moylan – one of the pioneering scholars of contemporary utopian studies – explores the utopian process in its individual and collective trajectory from dream to realization. Drawing on theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou and science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and China Miéville, Becoming Utopian develops its argument for sociopolitical action through studies that range from liberation theology, ecological activism, and radical pedagogy to the radical movements of 1968. Throughout, Moylan speaks to the urgent need to confront and transform the global environmental, economic, political and cultural crises of our time.

1

Strong Thought: Utopia, Pedagogy, Agency

Searching

It seems I have always lived between worlds, looking from one to another, finding ways to cut through the reality around me to see that other place that seemed to make more sense or at least be more interesting and maybe even satisfying. In that way, the method of utopia, with its double move of negation and anticipation, has been with me for a very long time.

I grew up finding my way across different cultures, different worlds. Son of Irish parents in Chicago, I lived between the Irish culture of my family and the new society of American promise in the postwar years of the 1940s and 1950s, happy in a nurturing home life yet often feeling it to be “old fashioned” when I went out and about in the city. Roman Catholic, in an Irish immigrant way, I found a set of values and discipline (and repression) that gave me an alternative to an increasingly consumerist culture, even as that larger sphere offered enticements not allowed by my parochial life. Working class, I found little in the sphere of the “rich” to interest me, and in fact I developed a nascent class antagonism as I saw my father patronized by his boss on the truck docks and stood there as the poor visitor as my dynamic and independent aunt was treated as a lesser servant by the North Shore couple whose children she cared for. Generally, my formation within the scope of my ethnicity, religion, and class gave me a secure sense of my self, and this was especially strengthened by my mother’s independent and courageous attitude, as she honored but questioned the authority of the Church and encouraged me to explore the larger society beyond our neighborhood and parish. I consequently looked outward to those other worlds as I found them to exceed all that I knew, thereby moving me to explore their ways, to consider their possibilities alongside the ones I knew so well. I came to see stimulating differences in each of my parallel worlds, realizing that each opened up the other for me, that each brought me to a world more intriguing or disturbing than the other.

This cultural tension gradually became more confrontational. That sense of committed difference that Catholicism gave me, that (still unformed) class anger I discovered, and that more distant sense of being of a people whose history had been one of occupation and dispossession segued into a more direct experience of assertion and contestation as I ventured out to the streets (as a child and then that creature called a “teenager”). In city parks, pizza parlors, and downtown avenues, I entered a newly named youth culture that rejected the mainstream conformist culture of the 1950s. In our all-too-innocent street gang baiting of the local police, in our clothing choice of blue jeans, combat boots, and black jackets, we stood for each other and against those who tried to tell us what to do. For me, especially, in what was becoming “our” own popular culture—of B-movies, comic books, and race, then rock, music—I discovered a standpoint from which I garnered a strength to be my “self” as I negotiated that mixture of old and new worlds (including throwing off my own subjection to childhood bullying, thus developing a deep hatred of and opposition to personal abuse and violence that have shaped my personal and political life ever since). And yet, mainstream society also issued its own call to an inspiring loyalty and commitment as the official culture of anti-communism took hold. In the heroism proffered by re-run Second World War movies, new TV programming (with series such as I Led Three Lives, featuring Herbert Philbrick, who was a “communist,” an FBI spy, and an “ordinary guy”), and public service ads extolling the norm of democracy and liberty, my Catholic call to witness, and thus to take a moral stand in a valueless world, was given a very different invitation to a social, if not yet political, imperative to work for liberty and against oppression.

What enriched these various appeals to my knowledge and commitment was my proclivity to read. Growing up in a loving home but without books, I soaked up the book culture of Catholicism once I went to school, becoming both a “devout” Catholic, as I read my way through liturgies and saints’ lives, and a “good” student, as I eagerly entered the world of learning. Not able to afford books, and as a child of my time, I bought hundreds of cheap comic books and immersed myself in the exploits of superheroes, the gore of horror, and the edginess of crime. And I remember how, in an early visit to the wondrous space of the library, I picked my first volume of Robert Heinlein off the shelf, and so had my mind turned forever by the usefully escapist literature of science fiction (sf). But my reading life took another turn when I was eleven years old. My Uncle John Stack died, and my Aunt Catherine thought that I, as the studious lad, should be given his desk and books. As it happened, John was the only overtly political person in the family: a member of an elevator operator’s union, he also attended what I later realized was a Trotskyist reading group, and what came down to me was his place of learning and his library. So, to my reading of saints’ lives and sf, I added books such as Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, along with an eight-volume atlas of the world. This infusion of history, political economy, and geography gave shape and depth to my ability to negotiate alternative, and oppositional, worlds.

For me, reading became a “subtle knife,” that mysterious tool given to us in volume two of Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials Trilogy. Reading gave me a means to cut through the barriers between worlds and to step inside other places, and move back and forth as needed, emotionally or strategically. Devouring both religious and secular texts, I began to value a life of commitment, whether articulated in the religious language of vocation, the existential (popularly beatnik) language of freedom, or, eventually, the political language of activism. That this early understanding of such a life was for me wrapped up in Catholicism, anti-communism, a slightly more removed commitment to Irish freedom, and seasoned with the frisson of life in the city was but the throw of historical dice. That this amalgam led eventually to a secularity that embraced a materialist spirituality, a generous communism, and an advocacy for freedom won by all oppressed people was but the result of a series of subsequent steps.

By high school in the late 1950s, I had, through the Young Christian Students movement, grown from an abstract anti-communist stance into the concrete anti-racist commitment of Chicago’s Catholic Interracial Council, with its adult leaders who were already connected with the young Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and shortly thereafter to the young activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. All this prepared me for work in my college years in the civil rights movement. From there, as a borderline member of the baby-boom and the 1960s generations, I entered the anti-war movement and then (as an eighteen-year-old who had to make pressing decisions in what I would now call “choice” or “body politics”) the anti-draft movement, becoming a conscientious objector to the US imperialist war as well as a radical activist involved in both legal and extralegal campaigns. Leaving conservative and then progressive Catholicism behind, and rejecting my own white and male privilege in my personal and political life, I affiliated with the New Left and with socialist feminism, thereby joining with people who carried their activist commitment and sensibility into all dimensions of their personal and working lives. From 1957, I moved from spontaneous civil rights and anti-war/anti-draft work into organized groups such as the Students for Democratic Society and the Milwaukee Communist Party (until the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968), on to the Wisconsin Alliance, and then the Democratic Socialists of America. Along the way, I engaged not only in the above campaigns but also in urban community organizing, alternative school development, and work in the emergent ecology movement (and was a member of my local socialist-feminist men’s group throughout the 1970s). As well, I continued my studies in graduate school (with an MA in English, and additional graduate study in theology) but then stepped out of the academy to teach in a community college, and only gradually returned to part-time doctoral studies. If reading was an engine of change on a personal level, my newly informed values and activism (which by the 1960s can be named as political) led me to embrace the vocation of teaching as a vehicle of sociopolitical challenge and transformation.

My purpose in recalling this trajectory in this opening chapter on utopian vision and method is to offer a reflection that revisits my upbringing in terms of what I now would call a utopian imaginary and a utopian turn, as I wandered, curiously and critically, between worlds—like a character in Pullman or like Shevek, the political activist and physicist in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. National aspiration, spiritual witness, class anger, youthful action, intellectual hunger, and racial and gender solidarity fed what grew into a utopian proclivity and no doubt set me up for life as a member of what Fredric Jameson has named the “Party of Utopia,” that long red line of those who will not settle for less than justice and freedom for everyone on an ecologically healthy earth, not via American imperialism or global capitalism but through the work of a collectively transformed and transforming humanity (Archaeologies epigraph). However, the more pressing question for this chapter is how this proclivity grew into a developed problematic and a method, one that shaped my studies, my teaching, and my writing, as well as my life as a citizen, an intellectual, and activist.

Reading

In his essay on the early days of the Birmingham cultural studies project, Stuart Hall described how he and his faculty colleagues would work with potential postgraduate students. As he put it:

It was not possible to present the work of cultural studies as if it had no political consequences and no form of political engagement, because what we were inviting students to do was to do what we ourselves had done: to engage with some real problem out there in the dirty world, and to use the enormous advantage given to a tiny handful of us […] who had the opportunity to go into universities and reflect on those problems, to spend that time usefully to try to understand how the world worked. […] So, from the start we said: What are you interested in? What really bugs you about questions of culture and society now? What do you really think is a problem you don’t understand out there in the terrible interconnection between culture and politics? […] And then we will find a way of studying that seriously. (1990: 13)

In this account, Hall identifies the direct challenge that I faced as I first stepped into graduate school in the mid-1970s. But from high school onward, I knew that learning for me was more than scholarly understanding or aesthetic appreciation, and certainly not a matter of acquiring cultural capital. For me, learning—as I had been given to understand from those diverse early influences—was an existential, intellectual, and spiritual way to know the world critically and thus a way to help change that world for the betterment of all its people and not the privileged few. Having left behind the study of medicine in my first year of college, I immersed myself in the undergraduate study of literature, history, and philosophy, as I looked for knowledge that would clarify what society was, how it worked, and how I and others could work to change it. Since I was studying at St. Mary’s College in Minnesota, I learned these subjects with Christian Brothers and fellow students who were already affiliated not only with the progressive sensibility of the Second Vatican Council and existential philosophy, but also with the radical politics of the civil rights and anti-war movements (indeed, Brothers and students at St. Mary’s took up leadership roles in the nonviolent anti-war actions of the Catholic Worker and the Catholic Left). And so, history, philosophy, and literary study on my campus were already in tune with the social and political world. In literature, especially, the interpretive frameworks of theological hermeneutics, existential philosophy, and the left populism of American studies gave me methods of social analysis that valued the aesthetic but did not stop at it.

However, in my master’s work in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the story was different. New Criticism reigned, and my MA studies did little to offer me the critical paradigm and method that I looked for (although it did give me a sensitivity and skill in formal analysis that has stood me well). Turning to my work as a community college teacher, from 1968 on, I searched for a critical problematic in my teaching. It was then that I was asked by my students to take my personal love of sf into the classroom; and by 1970, I was one of a very few teaching sf in a dedicated undergraduate course. Consequently, as one of the generation that broke open the English curriculum to allow for studies of popular culture, I began to find another way of working with literary texts. Then, as I returned to doctoral studies in the 1970s, Jack Zipes joined the faculty in Milwaukee; and, in his seminars (on Marxist criticism, the French Revolution, and the fairy tale genre) and in my work with the first editorial collective of New German Critique (NGC), I studied the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. With a combination of an orthodox Marxism (learned from the study groups of my activist life) and the Frankfurt problematic (learned in seminars and in the NGC collective), I began to develop a way to approach the literary landscape in ways that went beyond the isolated form of the text, but took that form seriously in a broader historical approach.

And then I encountered the work of Jameson on the politics of form in his early books, especially Marxism and Form (1971), and in his lectures at the July gatherings of the Marxist Literary Group (MLG). During my three summer sessions at the first meetings of the annual MLG Summer Institute of Culture and Society, I was able to work with Jameson and with others such as Stanley Aronowitz, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, and Terry Eagleton. Thus, what became a familiar matrix for many of us—German critical theory; French structuralism and poststructuralism; British cultural studies; American New Left, anti-racist, and feminist/gay cultural critique; and third-world liberation theory and criticism—gave me a more dynamic framework within which I could read literature in the context of the sociopolitical. With this framework, I was able in my Ph.D. work to find that “way,” in Hall’s sense, to work with sf, and then utopian fiction.

From this point, my sense of utopian aspiration began to find a more distinct method of producing and teaching critical, and transformative, knowledge. Central to this effort, as the Birmingham problematic encouraged, was my decision to let my object of study—the history and form of sf and utopian fiction—shape my interpretive strategies. In 1976, while teaching a graduate seminar at UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies, research fellow and sf writer, Samuel R. Delany, argued forcefully that academic scholarship had to stop imposing the critical apparatus used in the study of “high” realist and modernist literature and to adopt a method that worked with the specificity of the sf form. Sf, he urged, had to be taken on its own terms, and thus we needed to look to the way sf writers, editors, fans, and now fans-become-scholars considered the sf genre. As Angela McRobbie put it, in one of the great insights of Birmingham cultural studies, it was necessary to let the object of study shape the research, not the other way around (see McRobbie 1982).

Enriching this framework, the new writing by Darko Suvin on estrangement and cognition then became central to my evolving sense of form and method in sf studies (beginning with his “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” in 1972 and “Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea” in 1973), and Jameson added to this in his general theory and his work on sf and utopia. His review essay on Louis Marin’s Utopiques, “Of Islands and Trenches” (1977) was a key text in the identification of utopia’s fundamentally negative quality: as he argued that, rooted in the historical situation, utopia’s trajectory moves from its formal negation of that moment into the figuration of another possibility, one not attainable in the world as it is but one that pulls humanity into that not yet existent reality. Hence, Jameson made the first of several iterations that have recurred throughout his work: namely, that the “deepest subject” of the utopian text is precisely its impossibility in the world as it is. Only a revolutionary transformation can produce the future reality that utopia, working as it does with the “raw material” of the material and ideological world, can only ever prefigure (2005: 13). In addition, the 1976 special issue of the minnesota review on “Marxism and Utopia,” with Jameson’s introduction (“To Reconsider the Relationship of Marxism to Utopia”) and Suvin’s essay (‘“Utopian’ and ‘Scientific’: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels”) reinforced my decision to focus on the new utopian strain of sf that had emerged in the oppositional movements and countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s.

Thus, I developed my work on the “critical utopia” in my first substantial effort to study the political function of the utopian imagination as it informed a method of knowing and intervening in the world. My 1981 dissertation (with the ungainly title of “Figures of Hope: The Critical Utopia of the 1970s. The Revival, Destruction, and Transformation of Utopian Writing in the United States. A Study of the Ideology, Structure, and Historical Context of Representative Texts,” directed by Zipes) led eventually to Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination in 1986. Therein, I argued that the new utopian sf of the period—by the likes of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Le Guin, and Delany—revived and refunctioned the traditional literary utopia. Influenced by postmodern attention to self-reflexive form, political engagement enriched by self-critical practice (e.g., feminist consciousness-raising, New Left criticism-self-criticism), and a creative encounter with both anti-utopian critique and the utopian shadow of dystopian writing, these works (especially in the period between 1968 and 1976) offered a fresh approach to utopianism that emphasized its value as a critical, negative phenomenon even as it explored—in the form of figurative, not prescriptive, thought experiments—versions of a post-revolutionary society as well as, and significantly so, the radical activism required for movement toward that transformation. As I put it then:

A central concern in the critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject Utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream. Furthermore, the novels dwell on the conflict between the originary world and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is more directly articulated. Finally, the novels focus on the continuing presence of difference and imperfection within utopian society itself and thus render more recognizable and dynamic alternatives. (Moylan 1986: 10–11)

As it happened, my recognition in these works of a self-critical utopian method, and indeed of the figuration of a more open-ended utopian society of permanent revolution that develops through struggles deploying just such a process, was noted and worked with in both sf and utopian studies. Less attended to, however, was my argument that the critical utopias foregrounded a sharper focus on the nature and degree of political agency required for such practical and utopian transformations. My point was that in these works of a politically intense period the familiar structure of the literary utopia was reversed. Whereas, in more traditional utopian novels, the society is featured (with the visitor traveling through it and registering its wonders and differences from her or his homeland), in the critical utopias, “the primacy of societal alternative over character and plot [or the iconic over discrete registers] is reversed, and the alternative society and indeed the original society fall back as settings for the foregrounded political quest of the protagonist,” a protagonist who is “part of the ...