PART I:
INTRODUCTION
by China Miéville
1
Close to the Shore
If you know from where to set sail, with a friendly pilot offering expertise, it should not take you too long to reach Utopia.
Since the first woman or man first yearned for a better place, dreamers have dreamed them at the tops of mountains and cradled in hidden valleys, above clouds and deep under the earth â but above all they have imagined them on islands. The island utopia has been a standard since antique times: Eusebiusâs Panchaea and Iambulusâs Islands of the Sun; Henry Nevilleâs Isle of Pines, and Antangil, from the 1616 novel of that name; Baconâs Bensalem; Robert Paltockâs Nosmnbdsgrutt, from Peter Wilkins; Huxleyâs Pala; Austin Tappan Wrightâs Islandia; and countless more. And in the centre of that great archipelago of dissent and hope, one place, one name, looms largest.
This island, this book, is the paradigm. âMoreâs Utopiaâ, in the words of the scholar Roland Greene, âis perhaps the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage [and] introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopianâ, defined by âa multifarious phenomenon which I will call island logicâ.
But, to repeat, it is not a long voyage to get there. Citizens of Moreâs Utopia âkeep up the art of navigationâ, pass back and forth on various tasks, trading surpluses of âcorn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle ⊠to other nationsâ. Only the thinnest stretch of ocean separates Utopia from the mainland. For somewhere so famously and constitutively nowhere, this no-place Utopia is very close to the shore.
And thereâs a more startling surprise with regard to its island-ness, a fact of which not nearly enough is generally made:
[T]his was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus, that conquered it ⊠brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into ⊠good government ⊠Having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug ⊠and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he, beyond all menâs expectations, brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours, who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were struck with admiration and terror.
This most famous example of the island utopia, the ideal-type itself, is not by nature an island at all. The fifteen miles of water that keep it apart from the main body politic are not there by Godâs will, but by the sweat of native people, among others, digging at an invading conquerorâs command. The splendid â utopian â isolation is part of the violent imperial spoils.
The classic reactionary attack on the utopian impulse is that it is, precisely, no place, impossibly distant. But, disavowed and right there, in Moreâs foundation myth of the dream polity is a very different unease: that, wrought by brutality, coerced from above, it is all too close.
There could be no one better suited to frame Moreâs foundational text than that great dissident utopian and dissident-utopian thinker, Ursula K. Le Guin. In her words from âUtopiyin, Utopiyangâ, which follows Moreâs text in this book, âEvery utopia since Utopiaâ â at least â âhas also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the authorâs or in the readersâ judgement, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.â
These contradictions thrive in single heads as easily as between them, and in the texts those heads produce. The interminable debates about what More âreallyâ meant miss this obvious fact, and are thus of as much use as any other discussion of âactualâ artistic or political âintentâ that treats it as a given or a secret to be decoded. Which is to say: some, but not much.
Was Moreâs utopia blueprint, or satire, or something else? As if these are exclusive. As if all utopias are not always all of the above, in degrees that vary as much in the context of their reception as of their creation.
The dangerous drive, the dystopia-in-utopia, then, is not only in the impulse, though it can certainly reside there, but in the actuality: that proximity of the island to the shore. Tragedians making their peace with power, liberals loudly warn against utopianism from below (often full of sentimentalism for their own dead radicalism, and lachrymose at their new realism); alongside them the hard-right radicals of power and oppression dream their own dreams of the good life: supremacist arcadias. And those who rule, more powerful and traditionally less voluble than their apologists, calmly configure and effect utopias of their own. In which those they rule have no choice but to live and serve and die.
These are a few of the limits of utopia (explored in the companion essay of that name that follows this one).
But the fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesnât mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary. Utopianism isnât hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire. For recognition, like all desire, and/but for the specifics of its reveries and programmes, too; and above all for betterness tout court. For alterity, something other than the exhausting social lie. For rest. And when the cracks in history open wide enough, the impulse may even jimmy them a little wider.
We canât do without this book. We are all and have always been Thomas Moreâs children. Even his literary ancestors were also his preemptive descendants, throwing him up, making him a hinge point, so his ditch-demanding king could give their earlier yearnings a name. That we must keep returning to the text, with whatever suspicion, is to honour it. It gave us a formulation, a concept, we needed.
Though it is perhaps past time to rethink that word.
We donât know much of the society that Utopus and his armies destroyed â thatâs the nature of such forced forgetting â but we know its name. Itâs mentioned en swaggering colonial passant, a hapax legomenon pilfered from Gnosticism: âfor Abraxa was its first nameâ. We know the history of such encounters, too; that every brutalised, genocided and enslaved people in history have, like the Abraxans, been ârude and uncivilisedâ in the tracts of their invaders.
A start for any habitable utopia must be to overturn the ideological bullshit of empire, and, unsentimentally but respectfully, to revisit the traduced and defamed cultures on the bones of which some conquerorâs utopian dreams were piled up. âUtopiaâ is to the political imaginary of betterness as âRhodesiaâ is to Zimbabwe, âGold Coastâ to Ghana.
How, then, might we set out for New Abraxa?
âI donât think weâre ever going to get to utopia again by going forwardâ, says Le Guin, in âA Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to Beâ. And so she suggests instead the formula people of the Swampy Cree First Nation have traditionally used in orientation to the future: UsĂ puyew usu wapiw!
âI go backward, look forwardâ, it means. It describes the porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum, backing into a rock crevice, from where it can watch for danger ahead. âIn order to speculate safely on an inhabitable futureâ, she says, âperhaps we would do well to find a rock crevice and go backward.â Far from hyperbolic, the adjective âinhabitableâ seems admirably restrained in the face of the social and ecological degradation of accelerating neoliberalism.
From those rocks, the porcupine can plot its own utopias. And, at least as important, going backward, looking forward, it can try to escape the onrushing utopias of those in power.
But such utopias of the powerful have levelled many landscapes. Theyâre distinguished by their flattening power, by the fields of rubble they leave. What if they sweep up all the rocks and leave none between which to hide?
That defensive porcupine gait recalls another. The motion has a counterpart, a poignant inversion, the buffeting of a figure long-since a clichĂ© of radical pessimism, but the endless citation of which (including in âThe Limits of Utopiaâ, here) still canât quite strip it of its power and importance.
Walter Benjaminâs angel of history.
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread ⊠His face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet ⊠[A] storm ⊠blowing from Paradise ⊠irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
The porcupine goes backward, looks forward, to see futures â to avoid some, to plan another. The angel goes forward, looks backward, in anguish â plunging towards a future it canât see, mourning pasts it canât redeem.
Which way are the predatory utopias twisting us? Is the porcupine pulled from its broken crevice and wrenched around to hurtle future-ward in their slipstream? Or does the angel manage to catch the walls of the canyon with the tips of its outstretched wings and hold on and turn and wriggle into a place to hide and grit its teeth and face the telos of the wind?
Will the porcupine become the angel, or the angel the porcupine?
Yet again, thereâs no either/or. The history of all hitherto existing societies â itâs been pointed out many times â is a history of monsters, on all sides. Our utopianism is always-already a chimera. Angelus erethizon: a porcupine with celestial wings; a seraph bristling with spines.
And like those other hybrids which ultimately overthrew the ghastly utopia that created and despised them, our cousins, the beast-men of More(au), it must learn to move with an unprecedented crossbred gait. To use its parts and powers in ungainly but effective ways. Stilt-walking on wingtips, gripping with the quills of feathers and the quills of a sharper weapon kind. Fighting on four legs, two, and none, and swimming â itâs close to the shore â to New Abraxa.
It will move, perhaps, as it is just possible we might, with a new motion neither and both animal and divine.
2
The Limits of Utopia
Dystopias infect official reports.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demands a shift in our emissions by a third to avoid utter disaster. KPMG, in the leaden chattiness of corporate power-point-ese, sees the same horizon. NASA part-funds a report warning that systemic civilizational collapse âis difficult to avoidâ.
We may quibble with the models, but not that the end of everything is right out there, for everyone to discuss.
The stench and blare of poisoned cities, lugubrious underground bunkers, ash landscapes ⊠Worseness is the bad conscience of betterness, dystopias are rebukes integral to the utopian tradition. We hanker and warn, our best dreams and our worst standing together against our waking.
Fuck this up, and itâs a desiccated, flooded, cold, hot, dead Earth. Get it right? There are lifetimesâ-worth of pre-dreams of New Edens, from le Guin and Piercy and innumerable others, going right back, visions of what, nearly two millennia ago, the Church Father Lactantius, in The Divine Institutes, called the âRenewed Worldâ.
[T]he earth will open its fruitfulness, and bring forth the most abundant fruits of its own accord; the rocky mountains shall drop with honey; streams of wine shall run down, and rivers flow with milk; in short, the world itself shall rejoice, and all nature exult, being rescued and set free from the dominion of evil and impiety, and guilt and error.
And itâs never only the world thatâs in question: for Lactantius, as for all the best utopias, itâs humanity too. The world will rejoice because we at last will be capable of inhabiting it, free from the evil and impiety and guilt and error with which weâve excoriated it. The relationship between humanity and what weâd now call the environment will be healed.
But so rich a lineage has hardly stopped countless environmentalisms from failing, not merely to change the world, but to change the agenda about changing the world.
We who want another, better Earth are understandably proud to keep alternatives alive in this, an epoch that punishes thoughts of change. We need utopias. Thatâs almost a given in activism. If an alternative to this world were inconceivable, how could we change it?
But utopia has its limits: utopia can be toxic. What price hopelessness, indeed? But what price hope?
In 1985 the city government announced that it would locate a trash incinerator in South Central Los Angeles, a year after California Waste Management paid half a million taxpayersâ dollars to the consultancy firm Cerrell Associates for advice on locating such controversial toxic facilities. The Cerrell Report is a how-to, a checklist outlining the qualities of the â âleast resistantâ personality profileâ. Target the less educated, it advises. The elderly. âMiddle- and higher-socioeconomic strata neighborhoodsâ, it says, âshould not fall at least within the one-mile and five-mile radii of the proposed site.â
Target the poor.
That this is the strategy is unsurprising: that they admit it raises eyebrows. âYou knowâ, one wants to whisper, âthat we can hear you?â
In fact the local community did resist, and successfully. But what are sometimes called the Big Ten green groups â the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, and others â refused the request to join the campaign. Because, they said, it was not an environmental, but a âcommunity healthâ issue.
The fallacies of Big Green. Start with heuristics like rural versus urban, nature versus the social, and in the face of oppressive power you easily become complicit, or worse, in environmental injustice, in racism. Such simplistic urbophobic utopianism can unite the most nostalgic conservative, seeking solace in a national park, with the most extropian post-hippy touting an eco-start-up.
For Lactantius, it was God who would heal a broken nature. This is a more secular age â sort of. But not everyone leaves such messianism aside: some incorporate it into a new, and newly vacuous, totality.
In 1968, Stewart Brand opened the first Whole Earth Catalogue with an image of the Blue Planet, Spaceship Earth, a survival pod in which we mutually cuddle. Beside it the text read, âWe are as gods and might as well get good at it.â
Here, says the image, is a beautiful Gaian totality. Here, say the words, is the ecological subject: âWeâ. Which obviously leaves unanswered, in the famous punchline to the blistering, uneasy joke, Tontoâs question to the Lone Ranger: âWho is âweâ?â
Faced with the scale of whatâs coming, thereâs a common and baleful propriety, a self-shackling green politeness. âAnythingâ, the argument goes, âis better than nothing.â Hence solutions to tempt business, and the pleading for ecologically inflected economic rationality. Capitalism, we are told by Jonathan Porritt, an eminent British environmentalist, is the only game in town.
And businesses do adapt, according to their priorities. Whatever the barking of their pet deniers, the oil companies all have Climate Change Divisions â less to fight that change than to plan for profit during it. Companies extend into newly monetised territories. Thus the brief biofuels boom, and that supposed solution to the planetâs problems drives rapid deforestation and food riots, before the industry and market tank. The invisible hand is supposed to clean up its own mess, with Emissions Trading Schemes and offsetting. Opportunities and ince...