The Cultural Imaginary of the Internet

Virtual Utopias and Dystopias

M. Yar

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137436689
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137436696
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Contemporary culture offer contradictory views of the internet and new media technologies, painting them in extremes of optimistic enthusiasm and pessimistic concern. This book explores such representations, uncovering the roots of our cultural responses to the internet, centred upon a profoundly ambivalent reaction to technological modernity.

1

Unravelling Utopias and Dystopias

Abstract: This chapter provides the broader context for this study by outlining and analysing how utopian thought has been discussed by scholars from a range of relevant disciplines (sociology, politics, philosophy and literature). Particular attention is paid to modern utopias and dystopias, and the way in which they centre upon the challenges presented by rapid social change and the place of technology in shaping human relations.

Yar, Majid. The Cultural Imaginary of the Internet: Virtual Utopias and Dystopias. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137436696.0003.

Introduction

It is now something of a truism that the internet has transformed social, political, cultural and economic life – from the rise of e-commerce (Castells, 2003, 2009), through the growth of new social media and social networking (Fuchs, 2013), to the use of new communication technologies in political protest and revolutionary movements (Castells, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012). Scholarly and popular discourse addresses these developments, and presents them in contradictory ways – it imagines the internet as progress and liberation on the one hand, and as the site of risk, crime and harm on the other. This book starts with such contestation, and argues that the internet has rapidly become the space into which utopian and dystopian visions of the present and future are now projected. This imaginary, I suggest, can be located within a much broader social and cultural history, one that expresses profound ambivalence about technological change and its impact upon modern society. Consequently, in order to understand how and why we collectively imagine the internet in the ways we do, we must look beyond the past few decades and explore the cultural meanings that are sedimented around technology, and, in particular, the role ascribed to ‘techno-science’ in driving social change and reshaping human experience (and, indeed, potentially remaking humanity itself – Sloterdijk, 2009). This book aims to explore the meanings and narratives that shape our views of the virtual world. Its focus extends well beyond scholarly discussions to examine the wider imaginary manifest in popular culture, including film, television, novels and press reportage. In doing so, it seeks to uncover how our collective hopes, fears and fantasies about the future are now increasingly centred upon the virtual world. The concept of the imaginary used here does not imply something that is simply unreal or factually untrue – in the sense we might allude to a small child having ‘an imaginary friend’ or dismiss someone’s anxieties by assuring them that ‘you’re just imagining it’. Rather, drawing upon the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, the ‘social imaginary’ is intended to indicate a society’s ‘singular way of living, seeing and making its own existence’ and ‘which define what, for a given society, is “real” ’ (Castoriadis, quoted in Thompson, 1984: 6, 22; see also Taylor, 2002). Building upon this conceptualisation, the term ‘cultural imaginary’ refers to the ways in which the social imaginary is given a concrete form in the sphere of cultural production and communication, manifest, for example, in the discourses of the arts, literature, film, journalism and so on.

Understanding the utopian

The social, political, philosophical, literary and artistic imaginaries of Western culture have long had, as a recurrent preoccupation, a concern with the utopian (this is not to suggest that utopian explorations are the exclusive provenance of the West, as analogous reflections are present in Chinese, Indian, Japanese, African and Islamic traditions (Sargent, 2010: 68–80); however, for present purposes, I restrict myself to discourses located within the European traditions and their various colonial off-shoots). At different times, in different discursive modes, culture has by turns projected, speculated, promised, deconstructed and satirised a world, and a mode of human existence within that world, at odds with the lived reality of the moment. ‘Utopian thinking’ thus maintains a compelling hold upon the ways in which we individually and collectively conceive life and its possibilities, and the ways we imagine past, present and future. Utopian thinking is always a projective endeavour in which the immediacy of the present (‘what is’) blurs and marries with ‘what once was’ and ‘what might yet be’; what Northrop Frye (1965: 323) calls a ‘speculative myth ... designed to contain or provide a vision for one’s social ideas’. To borrow from the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1997), while ideology presents the present state of human affairs as somehow inevitable, utopia gestures to other possibilities and other times. More than an amalgam or array of specific schema and blueprints (Kateb, 1963), the utopian is above all a sensibility, a way in which human culture understands itself and interprets and evaluates lived experience in all its ambiguities and tensions. The utopian landscapes that emerge from such exertions can be both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in character. They may present a clarion call for the active transformation of society so as to realise a better, more ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ mode of existence; yet they may also function as a warning (or even a counsel of despair), seeing in the process of social change the inevitability of ‘decline’, ‘loss’ and disenchantment. Whichever paths they tread, such exercises, nevertheless, shape our cultural imaginary in decisive ways, seeping into the interstices and cracks of collective consciousness, moulding our shared self-understandings in ways both subtle and profound.

This book offers some thoughts on the character of such utopian thinking at the ‘twilight’ of Western modernity, a period during which the accumulated impacts of rapid change and recurrent crises have shifted the contours of human experience in significant ways. It suggests that the topography of utopia is now projected into the space of the virtual, an ‘other worldly’ realm in which the most extravagant of possibilities are imagined. Utopia is less and less imagined as a transformation of the plane of the actual, its immanent reconfiguration into new possibilities. Indeed, the present era is one in which utopian promises of reconciliation, revolution and progress ring ever-more hollow to our ears. If, as Jonathan Glover (2001) argues, the past century was primarily one of moral atrocities (Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Soviet Gulags, Pol Pot’s Year Zero and ethnic genocides) then these experiences have done much to erode the plausibility (or even the desirability) of utopian social engineering. When all attempts to realise utopian dreams end in living nightmares, and totalitarianism seems to rise recurrently from the idealistic pursuit of revolution (Popper, 2011), then grand visions of building a new society lose much of their appeal. It is this exhaustion, a sense of modernity’s failed promises, which impels a new imaginary to emerge: that of a space of transcendence existing apart from a material realm whose redemptive possibilities are seen as ever-more limited and unfeasible. To borrow from Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), the incredulity towards ‘grand narratives’ leaves ever-more limited space in which notions of purposive and progressive large-scale social transformation can find purchase, replaced instead by much more localised and modest petits récits (small narratives) around which we might organise our projects and endeavours. However, I would suggest that Lyotard was only half right; the utopian sensibility is a resilient one and is not easily lost even in the face of incredulity. Rather than simply disappearing, the utopian has been reinvigorated as it finds purchase within emerging discourses about the virtual. Our culture now imagines the internet as a space in which either the unfulfilled promises of modernity might finally be realised (liberation, self-transformation, solidarity, equality) or one in which such dreams find their final dissolution as the humanist vision is lost in a realm of technological hybridisation, alienation and domination. Both sides of this fevered, extravagant sensibility recode and replay the dialectical turnings of modernity: Rationalism and Romanticism, Technology and Nature, progress-as-loss and progress-as-redemption. It is only by critically reflecting on our cultural discourses about the virtual world in this way that we can begin to grasp why and how the virtual has become the utopian space of our times.

Recent scholarship in the human sciences has taken utopianism, those modes of thinking associated with the speculative projection of possible human worlds, as a distinctive object of analysis and interrogation. My aim here is not to systematically survey this scholarship – there are many informative works that do just this (see, for example, Kumar, 1997, 1991; Sargent, 2010; Levitas, 2011). Instead, I have drawn selectively upon this literature so as to delineate some important features of what I take to characterise utopian thinking. As early as 1936, Karl Mannheim discussed what he termed the ‘utopian mentality’, by which he meant a ‘state of mind’ that ‘is incongruous with the state of reality in which it occurs’(Mannheim, 1997: XX). Thus a first important feature of the utopian sensibility is its extrapolative quality, its conceptualisation of a world that is not simply derivable from the empirically available context in which that thinking occurs: it imagines a world different from, and often at odds with, the ‘actually existing’ social and historical conditions in which it takes place. A second noteworthy feature of utopianism is recapitulated by Bauman (1976) who notes that utopia functions in an ambiguous space of double meaning: it can refer both to u-topia, ‘a place which does not exist’, and to eu-topia, a good place, ‘a place to be desired’. This dual meaning can be traced to the first use of the term itself, in Thomas More’s Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia: A Truly Golden Handbook No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining (1516), now better known as Utopia. These two senses of utopia have in time come to be conjoined, and it ‘has come to refer to a non-existent good place’ (Sargent, 2010: 2). Thus at the heart of utopianism’s projective movement is a normative core: it is bound-up with the perennial attempt to imagine ‘the good life’.

A third element crucial for our understanding of the utopian is identified by Foucault (1967) in his well-known essay on heterotopias. He views such heterotopias as

sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

In other words, utopias, for all their disjunction from ‘the real space of Society’, nonetheless, always have their roots in that very space: their disjunctive quality arises from the ways in which they break with a lived reality that fundamentally defines them. Precisely for this reason all variants of utopia reflect and respond to the issues and concerns that predominate in society at the time of their composition. For example, the contours of the future society envisioned by William Morris in News from Nowhere (1890) – such as common ownership, democratic self-determination, the abolition of private property and the collapse of class distinctions – is an ‘inverted analogy’ of the capitalist England of the author’s time.

Claeys and Sargent (1999) give us useful insights into utopias as modes of ‘cultural production’. They define all utopian cultural discourses as ‘the imaginative projection, positive or negative, of a society that is substantially different from the one in which the author lives’ (emphasis added). Important here is the claim that utopias are not co-extensive with eu-topias – utopian constructions cannot be confined to those that depict a desirable state of affairs. In fact, both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (dystopian) imagined worlds are variants of utopian thinking. Indeed, they point out that it is by no means a straightforward business to determine whether a particular imagined unreality is meant as a positive (eu-topian) or negative (dystopian) representation. A prime example of this indeterminacy is one of the most famous products of the utopian canon, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). On the one hand, More’s Utopia can be read as a positive projection of a better society, the depiction of an ordered society that furnishes a pointed contrast to ‘the chaos of sixteenth-century life in England’ (Frye, 1965: 325). On the other hand, it can be understood as a satire of radical and ‘heretical’ views that circulated in Europe at the time of writing. For example, More’s imagined society features married priests, female priests and the abolition of private property – these would seem to be antithetical to an author who was a devout Catholic, enthusiastic persecutor of Protestant ‘heretics’ , and one of England’s major land owners. The suspicion that Utopia’s social order is the subject of mockery rather than commendation is furthered when we realise that More indulges in sly word plays – for example, the name given to the visitor who describes the island is Hythlodaeus, which in Greek means ‘distributor or speaker of nonsense’ (Wilson, 1992: 33; Sargent, 2010: 22).

Claeys and Sargent further distinguish between two ‘modes’ of utopian thinking. The first looks backwards towards an imaginary past in which life was ‘different’ and ‘better’. This utopia is often a kind of prelapsarian paradise, imagined as Eden, Arcadia and suchlike. In its setting, a ‘natural’ or ‘spontaneous’ life is enjoyed, one of sensual gratification, solidarity, harmony, community, plenitude or innocence. One of the earliest such utopias is that of the Golden Age (Χρυσόν Γένος) which is commonly attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod (and later reworked by the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid). In his Works and Days (dated to the 6th century BC), Hesiod depicts the ‘Five Ages of Man’, starting with the Golden Age. In this first Age,

... they lived like gods and no sorrow of heart they felt.

Nothing for toil or pitiful age they cared,

But in strength of hand and foot still unimpaired

They feasted gaily, undarkened by sufferings.

(Hesiod, quoted in Claeys and Sargent, 1999: 7)

Such utopian representations are characterised by two particularly notable features. First, the life of ease and abundance is portrayed as a gift to Man from Nature, the gods or God – in this case, it is presided over by the Titan Kronos, son of Uranus and Gaia, and father of Zeus (and ends when the Titan is overthrown by his son). Second, this earliest incarnation of human existence is depicted as the best possible such life, and in the mythic history offered (such as Hesiod’s Five Ages) subsequent eras are imagined as a decline from utopian beginnings – from an original state of peace and plenitude, Man is cast into a life of hardship, want, conflict, war and suffering:

Fifth is the race that I call my own and abhor

O to die, or be later born, or born before!

This is the Race of Iron. Dark is their plight.

Toil and sorrow is theirs, and by night.

(Ibid.)

This narrative sequence, leading from perfection to corruption, may be reasonably presented as the prototype of Christianity’s tale of the Fall and Man’s expulsion from Eden (Delumeau, 2000: 6–7). This ‘paradise lost’ may be ritually recaptured in schema that promise at least a temporary restoration of the imagined ideal past. Examples include the Roman festival of Saturnalia (honouring the god Saturn), which offered to recapture the conditions of the Golden Age, including its egalitarianism (Roman masters would wait upon their slaves) and bountiful indulgence in the pleasures of feasting, intoxication and gambling (Frazer, 2009: 631–2). The spirit of the Saturnalia was later recuperated into the Medieval Christian ‘Feast of Fools’ (Harris, 2011) and the tradition of Carnival (Gardiner, 1992). Indeed, it has been argued that the reactivation of an original state of fulfilment is still evident in a range of contemporary social and cultural practices, spanning the Mardi Gras of New Orleans (Gotham, 2005), seaside holidays (Webb, 2005) and the social protests of the Occupy movement (Tancons, 2011).

The second ‘mode’ of thinking is very different: it looks not to utopia as the restoration of a natural condition now lost in the past, but imagines utopia as the intentional product of rational action, the outcome of ‘human contrivance’ or social ‘engineering’ through which the good society might be realised in the future. Here, utopia is fabricated through an alliance of rational planning and human will, the outcome of concerted agency (an achievement of what Hannah Arendt (1999) calls homo faber, the human capacity to create and build a world that is not ‘given’). Such utopian fictions are instances of what Raymond Williams (1978: 203) calls ‘the willed transformation, in which a new kind of life has been achieved by human effort’. An illustrious early example of such a utopian construct is, of course, Plato’s Republic. Plato’s ideal state, Kallipolis (literally the ‘good city’) is ruled by a caste of philosopher-kings whose pursuit of the good is grounded in their dedication to wisdom, which in itself is conceived as an awareness of the ideal forms: they possess ‘knowledge of the true being of each thing’ and so have ‘perfect vision of the other world to order the laws about beauty, goodness, justice’ (Book VI). In a significant sense Plato provides a template for all later utopias that are called into being through rational action. Such engineered utopias come into their own under the aegis of Enlightenment modernity; it is the distinctive belief in human agency and reason, the ability of human beings to purposefully effect social progress through wholesale transformation, which inspires many such utopian visions. However, modern utopias of this kind differ markedly from that of Plato insofar as they depend on a very different concept of reason. Far from the contemplative apprehension of eternal and metaphysical truths so beloved of Plato, modernity’s reason is grounded in what Francis Bacon called the Novum Organum, the ‘new method’ of scientific reasoning that is tied to the pursuit of empirical knowledge through observation and experimental inquiry. Reason of this kind could reveal the underlying workings of nature, which in turn could be directed in the name of human betterment and progress (Bacon, 2009). Three years after the publication of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Unravelling Utopias and Dystopias
• 2  The Techno-Scientific Utopias of Modernity: From Real to Virtual
• 3  Virtual Utopias and the Imaginary of the Internet
• 4  The Dystopian Worlds of Techno-Science
• 5  Virtual Dystopias and the Imaginary of the Internet
• 6  Beyond Virtual Utopias and Dystopias?
• Bibliography
• Index