Utopia, a Necessary Heresy
An analysis of some contemporary phenomenons that render the desire to imagine the future
Marc Augè
Balcans, Fragments of life between Sarajevo and Belgrade
Photo Chiara Dalmaviva
If Utopia today seems heresy, it is because our planet is in thrall to an ideology of the present and of evidence that apparently renders obsolete the lessons of the past as much as the desire to imagine the future. This ideology is articulated in various ways and we can determine its existence from at least three contemporary and concomitant phenomena.
Spatial language expresses and in a sense protects the current organization of the world
The first of these is the loss of myths of the past and of the future, a loss that Lyotard explored in La condition postmoderne (1979). For him, 18th century modernity led to the disappearance of founding myths and cosmogonies – particularist myths which describe the origins of a given group – and replaced them with myths of the future, eschatological myths which are at the same time universalist, evoking the future of humanity. The post-modern moment arrives when, in their turn, these new myths of the future are lost. This is what Lyotard calls the “end of the great narratives”, which corresponds to the loss of the illusions that man had fostered regarding the progress of humanity, notably when faced with the atrocities and the totalitarian experience of the 20th century. One of the reasons for this failure relates to what Lyotard later called the différend, namely the difference in perception between those who posit a universalist and liberative ideology and those who historically experience its effects. Was the French revolution an act of universal liberation or the expression of French expansionism that found its true hero in Napoleon? No doubt both, and at this point the difficulties commence.
So the theme of the end of the great narratives anticipated Fukuyama’s widely received development: the end of history. Evidently this is not the conclusion of events, but the end of intellectual and ideological debate: everyone would now agree that the free-market/representative-democracy formula is unassailable. In Spectres de Marx (1993) Derrida points out that Fukuyama’s formulations are unclear and that doubt remains regarding his interpretation of the notion of the ‘end of history’: is it incontestable fact or speculative hypothesis? Fukuyama brings the ‘good news’ (Derrida points up the evangelical language) of the advent of liberal democracy, as much empirical event as ideal regulator: “The event is as much the realization as the announcement of the realization”. But this very hesitation (or incoherence) is typical of an intellectual atmosphere in which nothing seems more difficult to imagine than the future.
The second phenomenon is the predominance of spatial over temporal language. Today talk is of the opposition and eventual complementarity of global and local. This pairing has replaced the particular/universal opposites which, associated with a dialectic conception of history, were consolidated through time. Paul Virilio, in La bombe informatique (1998), effectively demonstrated the strategic use that the Pentagon has made of the global/local opposites, assimilating them to interior and exterior.
Our technological environment performs something of the role of the traditional cosmologies
According to Virilio, the interior, for the Pentagon, signifies the interior of the economic and technological system which, via networking, produces globalization; the interior is the global and vice versa. On the other hand, the exterior is local, in that it is not a simple replication of the global, but interferes with the system and is therefore entitled to a right of intervention. It is understandable how, in this perspective, history as a perturbation of the system can only have a local origin. Spatial language expresses and in a sense protects the current organization of the world.
The third phenomenon to take into consideration in order to understand the heretical nature of Utopia today is the reign of the image, especially televised images. On the one hand, they lock us in space. Geostationary satellites bounce images from one part of the planet to another. The latest news is repeated, interpreted and broadcast almost simultaneously everywhere on earth. We are accustomed to being regularly updated. Our technological environment performs something of the role of the traditional cosmologies, which mapped out space (including the human body) and time (including birth and death), explaining everything from this symbolic ordering of the world onwards.
Today we are simply surrounded by extremely sophisticated material objects that constantly invade our existence and appear to give it sense. They function as a ‘cosmotechnology’. At the same time, they are very near to us; putting us under house arrest, enabling us to communicate with the entire world without leaving home, accustoming us to a technological cocoon that shelters us from past and future, as though only the present existed.
