Looking for the blue: The necessity of utopia

Abstract

This article argues that utopia is both prevalent and necessary. It begins by looking at the presence in contemporary culture of an existential quest for utopia, figured as ‘looking for the blue’. It then moves to the place of utopia in political thought and political discourse, figured as ‘looking for the green’. These approaches reveal different formulations of the concept of utopia itself. The shift requires that Utopia is understood as a method rather than a goal, and accompanied by a recognition of provisionality, responsibility and necessary failure.

Notes

 1. ‘Is there a role for Utopia in Twenty-First Century Ideology?’, organised by the Centre for Political Ideologies, University of Sheffield and the Centre for Political Ideologies, University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, 17 June 2005. This article draws on some of the ideas set out in R. Levitas, ‘Utopia Matters’, in F. Vieira and M. Freitas (Eds), Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts (Porto: Editora da Universidade do Porto, 2005), pp. 41–46.

 2. K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).

 3. Cited in V. Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London: Methuen 1987), p. 17.

 4. This I have done elsewhere: R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip Allan, 1990).

 5. E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope (London: Blackwell, 1986).

 6. R. Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian thought for an Anti-utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 113.

 7. Bloch, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 5.

 8. Bloch, op. cit., Ref. 5, p. 249. For a discussion of abstract and concrete utopia, see R. Levitas, ‘Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia’, in J.O. Daniel and T. Moylan (Eds), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso, 1997).

 9. It does not follow that any set of illustrations is as good as any other, and I have chosen these because I think they illustrate the general prevalence of utopianism, its embeddedness in popular culture, and the movement between forms. Many of the examples are taken from sources available in late 2004 to early 2005, in London, Paris or Toronto. Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven, originally shown in 1978, was re-shown on British television early in 2005. Ian McEwan's Saturday was published early in 2005. A major exhibition of TurnerWhistlerMonet toured Toronto, Paris and London between summer 2004 and summer 2005. August Strindberg: Painter, Photographer, Writer was exhibited at the Tate Modern in Spring 2005. Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials achieved phenomenal sales among both children and adults, and was staged at the National Theatre in London in 2004/5. The Mozart biography was published ten years earlier.

10. H. Carpenter, Dennis Potter: the Authorized Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 350–351.

11. P. Auster, Oracle Night (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 42–43. There are a number of recent novels that deal with synaesthesia, literally the activation of one sense by the stimulation of another, as well as the emotional resonance of colour, and such phenomena as seeing the days of the week in colour. R. Thomson's Divided Kingdom (London: Bloomsbury, 2005) divides the United Kingdom into four districts based on the four humours, each of which is represented by a colour—green for melancholia, red for sanguinity, yellow for choler. Blue represents the phlegmatic temperament, and is seen as linked to water in particular.

12. W. Kandinsky (tr. M. T. H. Sadler) Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover 1977 [1911]), p. 38. Kandinsky was a core member of the Blau Reiter group, and Der Blau Reiter Almanach published articles on music by such composers as Schönberg, Webern and Berg. Kandinsky also wrote a play called Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound).

13. M. Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Colour (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

14. Carpenter, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 350.

15. Carpenter, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 348.

16. F. Schubert, in E. Mandyczewski (Ed), Fifty-nine Favourite Songs (New York: Dover, 1985), pp. ix, 22.

17. M. Solomon, Mozart: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1995), p. 378.

18. Solomon, Mozart: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1995)., p. 18.

19. Solomon, Mozart: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1995)., p. 135.

20. Solomon, Mozart: A Life (London: Pimlico, 1995)., p. 197.

21. E. Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London: Verso, 1985), pp. 258, 60.

22. Solomon, op. cit., Ref. 17, p. 509; Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (London: Verso, 1985)., p. 258.

23. I. McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), p. 28.

24. Solomon, op. cit., Ref. 17, p. 381.

25. McEwan, op. cit., Ref. 23, pp. 171–172.

26. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 36.

27. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 102.

28. M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

29. H. Glossner, ‘The Most Arcane Secrets of Harmony’, notes to J.S. Bach, Morimur, The Hilliard Ensemble and Christoph Poppen, (ECM New Series 1765 461 995-2, 2001). Glossner says that the title ‘Morimur’ is the middle line in the Trinitarian formula, ‘death as a passage into life. This basic Christian tenet is deeply rooted in the baroque age, and thus in Bach's consciousness. It is accompanied by the view that earthly music is but a figura, an anticipatory likeness, that prefigures the future sounds of heaven, which therefore exist in the world below in hidden form’. He continues in almost kabbalistic vein: ‘The language of notes and the symbolism of numbers provide the necessary tools and resources to unveil the status of such encryptions and the secret nature of such prefigurations of the celestial harmony’ (ibid., p. 43). Glossner also points out that 20th-century composers such as Alban Berg, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Paul Hindemith ‘quote’ chorales in a context where they will not be immediately recognised by the audience. He wonders whether these ‘composers of the secularly-minded 20th century, consciously or unconsciously wished the earthly desperation depicted in their operas to be a negative metaphor for hope—a figura ex negativo—and thus an image of hope after all, albeit in encrypted form’ (ibid., p. 44).

30. Kandinsky, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 38.

31. Recent dystopian novels include M. Atwood's Oryx and Crake (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), K. Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Faber & Faber, 2005), and Thompson's Divided Kingdom (2005). On dystopia and its relation to utopia and anti-utopia, see T. Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, 2000) and T. Moylan and R. Baccolini, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (London: Routledge, 2003). Pullman's work may be read more as critical dystopia than utopia.

32. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 153, 157.

33. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What is to be Done? (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), p. 211.

34. See Levitas, op. cit., Ref. 4.

35. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 35.

36. A mensch is a Yiddish term for a thoroughly good person (of either gender).

37. Auster, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 44–46.

38. J. Gray ‘What's it all about, Terry?’ (Review of Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, Oxford University Press, 2007) The Independent, 2 March 2007.

39. D. Barenboim, ‘Meeting in Music’, Reith Lecture 4 (London: BBC, 2006).

40. Lunn, op. cit., Ref. 21, p. 274.

41. Gray's thoughts on utopianism are developed further in his recently published, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2007).

42. See Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6. Jacoby provides a scathing critique of the anti-utopian arguments of Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, demonstrating that the posited connection between totalitarianism and utopianism is false. I have argued elsewhere that the problem with totalitarianism is not its utopianism but its totalitarianism see R. Levitas and L. Sargisson, ‘Utopia in Dark Times’, in T. Moylan and R. Baccolini (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 31, pp. 13–28. Unfortunately, however, Jacoby is innocent of the debates over the definition of utopia, and begins this argument by an implicit definition of the utopian ‘tradition’ in terms of content (peace, harmony and the like). He refuses, therefore, the idea that Nazism could be seen as utopian.

43. M. Kettle, ‘The naïve lead the naïve in a campaign of liberal guilt’, The Guardian, 7 June 2005, p. 22.

44. T. Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1978), p. 156.

45. E. Shaw, ‘What Matters is What Works: The Third Way and the Case of the Private Finance Initiative’, in S. Hale, W. Leggett and L. Martell (Eds), The Third Way and Beyond: Criticisms, Futures, Alternatives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 65.

46. R. McKibbin, ‘The Destruction of the Public Sphere’, London Review of Books, 28 (1), 5 January 2006, pp. 3–6.

47. McKibbin, ‘The Destruction of the Public Sphere’, London Review of Books, 28 (1), 5 January 2006., p. 6.

48. R. Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998); and R.M. Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 1998).

49. R. Levitas, ‘Competion and Compliance: The Utopias of the New Right’, in R. Levitas (Ed), The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge: Policy Press, 1985).

50. S. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, Foreign Affairs, 1993.

51. I. Asimov, Foundation (London: Collins, 1994); G. Foden, ‘War of the Worlds’, The Guardian, 24 August 2002.

52. L. Harding and N. Watt, ‘Kandahar Cheers Death Knell of Taliban's Bizarre Utopia’, The Guardian, 8 December 2001, p. 8; P. Beaumont, ‘Kandahar on Brink of Chaos as Warlords Ready for Battle’, The Observer, 9 December 2001, p. 5.

53. H. Sagiyeh, ‘Al-Quaeda Loses Itself in Dream World’, The Observer, 16 December 2001, p. 5.

54. G. Bush, 12 September 2001. Bush's speeches are archived at www.whitehouse.gov/news.

55. T. Blair, 11 September 2001. Blair's speeches are archived at www.10downingstreet.gov.uk

56. Blair, 11 September 2001. Blair's speeches are archived at www.10downingstreet.gov.uk., 12 September 2001.

57. Blair, 11 September 2001. Blair's speeches are archived at www.10downingstreet.gov.uk., 2 October 2001.

58. D. Barenboim, BBC Radio 4, 25 March 2005.

59. The first account of the ‘iros’ method is given in R. Levitas, ‘The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method’, in R. Baccolini and T. Moylan (Eds), Utopia—Method—Vision (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007).

60. R. Levitas, ‘Against Work: A Utopian Incursion into Social Policy’, Critical Social Policy, 21, 2001, pp. 449–465.

61. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977), p. 792.

62. N. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. viii.

63. Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)., p. viii.

64. P. Pullman, His Dark Materials (London: Scholastic Press, 1995–1998).

65. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 102–103. The writers whom Jacoby is chiefly considering here are: Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Fritz Mauthner, and Martin Buber. It might be objected that Jacoby's neglect of most of the literature on utopia and utopianism leads to a reinvention of the wheel. The argument begs questions about how far Jacoby's distinction is different from that of, for example, Miguel Abensour who distinguishes between heuristic and systematic utopias; how far the productions of the so-called ‘blueprint utopians’ were intended as blueprints at all; and how far the characteristics of iconoclastic utopianism derive from the second commandment rather than from Marxism, or a simple recognition of the historically determined character of aspirations. The description of iconoclastic utopianism is also somewhat tendentious in the case of Bloch: his definition of utopia is infinitely wider, embracing the whole of philosophy and much else besides, and is essentially based on the utopian function, rather than form or content. The move from abstract to concrete utopia that Bloch makes runs against some of Jacoby's claims about iconoclastic utopianism.

66. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 85.

67. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 112.

68. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 128.

69. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 128.

70. Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6., p. 137.

71. Lunn, op. cit., Ref. 21, p. 231.

72. Lunn, op. cit., Ref. 21., pp. 177ff.

73. G. Landauer, cited in Jacoby, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 107.

74. Solomon, op. cit., Ref. 17, p. 195.

75. F. Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso, 1998).

76. Lunn, op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 126–127.

77. Lunn, op. cit., Ref. 21., p. 66.