Jonathan Swift had little patience for the extraordinary claims made by some of the more adventurous travel writers of his era. As the Age of Exploration drew to a close, Gulliver’s Travels already signaled the incredulity of imposing abstracted social systems. Among the most hilariously convincing of all Swift’s characters are the professors at the University of Laputa, among whom one has spend the last eight years attempting to “extract sunbeams from cucumbers.”
Given that sunbeams go into the making of cucumbers, should not we scholars be able to retrieve them, if even analytically? My foray into a (satirical) utopian novel demonstrates some of the conceptual difficulties we face: utopianism is clearly a key ingredient in the cultural matrix around intentional communities, destination resorts, and small town
One of the most troubling problems of this research project is the widespread profusion of the term ‘utopia’ in popular culture, literature, and academic theory. Beyond the classical antinomy built into More’s coinage (by definition, can perfection exist?), utopia works as a descriptor for places that are nice to live, a comforting false consciousness, a kind of dreaming constitutive of the modern age, a kind of critical imaginary exercise, and a branch of literature that engages with fundamental questions of social and natural organization.
Because the people and communities we are researching do not necessarily pursue explicitly utopian visions (i.e. they are not necessarily carrying out a coherent project as were followers of Bellamy, Fourier, Skinner, etc.), we should not use the word “utopia” to indicate what Russell Jacoby calls “blueprint utopianism.” From the religious and educational reforms proposed by More and Bacon to the social and economic restructuring advocated by Fourier and Bellamy, the social incarnation of utopia can be understood as a bringing to fruition of a imaginary society, a kind of project that is at once critical and generative. Perhaps Jacoby’s alternative classification, “iconoclastic utopianism,” can help us resist the temptation to reduce the communities of Ecotopia to recapitulations of utopianism from earlier moments of the modern age.
What challenges this research aspiration, however, is the fact that by recognizing that we cannot oversimplify modern environmental utopianism as a coherent social engineering project a la Marxism, we risk sinking in the quicksand that is (post)modernity. If the modern age as we inhabit it today can be characterized as “liquid,” then it is worthwhile to think through what it means for people to engage in utopianism fluidly. ‘The ideal’ is no longer an economic structure or a social mechanism; rather ‘the ideal’ itself comes under constant scrutiny. It is always produced, and thus consumed—and the consumers are often aware of the processes of fabrication. So as not to collapse into pure cynicism, our study of the salience of utopianism amongst the communities of Ecotopia requires two things; first, humility in the face of the impossible task of extracting certainty about ‘the ideal’ society in an age of radical uncertainty; and second, an insistence that dreaming and hoping remain important ingredients of modern life, even if those dreams and hopes can no longer be discretely tied to particular, visceral imaginary worlds.
