Eutopia

Discussion

Hanzi Freinacht:

"Modernity, in its deeper sense, originated in the emergence of “perspective” in the visual arts, in the Renaissance paintings of Northern Italy — it only began to fully come into fruition around the early 19th century in Europe, with industrialization and the rise to prominence of the scientific-rational worldview. And, of course, with the Enlightenment beginning to shape society as a whole.

* Eutopia: Two counterreactions to Modernity

From around this time onwards — when Modernity was beginning to bloom in full — counterreactions to the Modern project started to appear. These reactions came from two distinct sources. One was the resistance of the colonized, of slaves, of indigenous peoples, of non-European civilizations and traditions around the world. New such sources of questioning, resistance, and attempts at redefining knowledge, reality, power relations, and nature itself have emerged ever since. In today’s world, for instance, Indian dalits struggle to influence the official definition of themselves on Wikipedia in an uphill battle against mostly white, Western, male experts, while indigenous tribes of the Amazon seek to protect their lands from extractive exploitation by international corporations. Following the postcolonialist feminist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we can employ an umbrella term for this kind of counter-reaction: the subaltern (although the term was initially coined by the cultural Marxist, Antonio Gramsci).

The other source of counterreactions grew from within Modern society itself — the impulse of Romanticism that reacted against the cold rationality of the Modern project (through literature, through paintings, through philosophical stances, and through social and spiritual movements) became the first in a long series of counter-cultures that came from the “most Modern” strata of society, often the most cultivated and educated. Indeed, many of these counter-cultures became so important that they flavored Modernity itself — just consider, for instance, the influence of the American Beat Generation on popular culture and thus on the Hollywood-saturated mainstream of Western culture and beyond. In a very general sense, there is thus an intimate connection between such widely disparate phenomena as Romanticism, socialism, feminism, anti-racism, expressionist and dadaist art, critical theory and sociology, and hippies: They all somehow grow from and react against the confines of that assumed 3D background space of Modernity and its purported sense of objectivity and implied directionality. That is why we can meaningfully understand these as expressions of the Postmodern mind — one that breaks away from Modernity and its static perspective where nature and culture are separate.

[Please note that I’m not using the term “Postmodern” in the conventional academic sense here, i.e. specifically relating to certain philosophical currents in the 1970s and onwards, but as a general structure of mind and society that emerges as a critique of Modern society, as discussed in my book, The Listening Society.]

If Modernity tore nature loose from its social confines (again, space itself, not social roles, define the perspective, and so the king will be smaller if he is farther away in the painting with a mathematical correct perspective), then Postmodernity places the view on nature back into its social and cultural context — a context it never left. After all — who’s looking? Whose gaze is it that describes reality in a certain way? The direction the gaze is looking will always define the direction, the horizon, the Utopia of this particular viewer. Does the photo realism and mathematical correct 3D perspective of a Renaissance painting (and, by extension, of Newtonian mechanics, of the scientific method, of market liberalism and representative democracy) truly encompass the perspective of, say, arts and rituals in the Yoruba traditions of West Africa? Do not women, on average, think less spatially and more relationally than men — and if so, does this background assumption not subtly exclude feminine perspectives? We can call this second category, simply, the countercultural.

In many cases, these two currents — the subaltern and the countercultural— have intermingled and drawn upon one another. Sociological understandings of how knowledge is constructed in society (a countercultural understanding) have, for instance, benefitted from the outsider perspectives of Amazonian tribes (in Claude Levi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology) and W.E.B. DuBois’ early studies of African-Americans. Conversely, today’s subaltern movements from different cultures gather around the ideas such as Multitude, i.e. the larger network of diverse social justice movements. Regardless of how they are combined, they all entail some kind of breach with the Modern project itself and its Utopia, its grand narrative(s). What you get instead is the search for the good life, for a better society, in the exception.

* Eutopia: Breaking out of the Renaissance painting

In terms of societal visioning, of the release of the sociological imagination as a force for transformation, this shift from Modern to Postmodern worldviews entails a corresponding shift from Utopia to Eutopia — from nowhereland to “the good place”. The Postmodern mind holds that “the good place” is not somewhere distant, nor a static vision like Plato’s Republic: it’s here and now — but it is more contextual, more local, more momentary, more subversive. The Good Place is hidden in plain sight, as it were. You don’t get there by following the yellow brick road towards the static Utopian horizon, but precisely by breaking away from that “Modern 3D” framework altogether. Phonetically, Utopia and Eutopia sound the same — but the different spellings reveal a shift — away from the spatial journey to Utopia, and towards the perspectival sleight-of-hands that reveal the little Eutopias that were there all along; the worlds that were forgotten, suppressed, made invisible.

The Eutopian (not to be confused with the European or the Ethiopian — yes, I know it’s a weird term, bear with me) striving is, in a profound but difficult-to-spot manner, a direct reversal of the Utopian one: Where the Utopian sees a distance between the misery of here-and-now and the promised land on the horizon that seems to logically follow from the here-and-now, the Eutopian notices how close, how utterly present The Good Place already is, and how it needs only be revealed. Utopia feeds on distance, Eutopia on closeness: on that which was too close to be properly seen as long as eyes were staring into the distance.

And so Eutopia is sought in the commons (these solidary forms of economic organization that predate capitalism and exist in most traditional societies to this day), in the relative happiness of e.g. San hunter-gatherer societies, in different Shangri-Las of local communities of care in downtrodden neighborhoods, in solarpunk collectives, in the rugged camps of Occupy Wallstreet and the spirit that animates them. The Eutopian is convinced that if you look hard enough at foreign cultures and civil society, at the intellectual voices that are decidedly non-Western, non-mainstream, at the many movements of social justice around the world, at the most experimental communities of Kibbutzes and Mexican Zapatistas and the Kurdish Rojava and Spanish communist villages and experimental cryptocurrencies… then you’ll see it: a fleeting but all-too-real proof that another world is possible, a genuinely good place. Eutopia.

While the Eutopian avoids the grand schemes and fixed sense of direction inherent in Modern Utopia, there is a certain limitation to it: If “the good place” is always found in an exception, in the uniqueness of a situation, the Good Place is never successfully generalized and transferred across time, space, and cultural differences. The Eutopian reveals that ways of life already exist that are even preferable to whatever Utopia the masses of the Modern mainstream have been imagining — if only we can shift our perspectives and stop staring at that disappearing point in the distance. The Eutopian turns every stone, scours history, archeology, and anthropology to find glimmers of hope, and then beckons: if this was possible, imagine then what could be possible for all societies across the world, if only we escaped the shackles of our limited ideas of the world!

But, alas, the search for Eutopia never ends — it never settles, it never locks on target and builds momentum; it never starts the positive feedback cycle that marks the growth of all living systems; it never translates across different scales. Fireworks of enthusiasm spark, again and again, energizing Eutopians to believe that a great shift of perspective is coming, a new set of ideas, a new project, a new struggle, a new subtly exotified other in a distant village or rural land, in the favelas or banlieues. But for all the intimacy with indigenous wisdom, for all the experience in social justice movements, for all the studies of Eastern Traditions — the Eutopians never come up with solutions to the great challenges of the Modern project. To the Eutopian, it feels as though the great transformation is always just around the corner; and so the relentless search continues indefinitely.

Eutopia is necessary for our dreams of a better society to become multi-perspectival, inclusive, and integrative of many perspectives — but it ultimately asks the wrong question. It still looks for The Good Place. Certainly, depending on what criteria are being measured for, such “good places” do indeed exist in secret corners of the world, even if they are always bound within limited confines of space, time, context, and a limited set of criteria of how the “good” is measured. The problem is that Eutopia is always defined in opposition to whatever is perceived as Modern and mainstream — and, as such, it misses the mark on the greatest challenge of all: to find the generative conditions that increase the likelihood of many Eutopias across multiple contexts.

We all know we’re not headed towards a solarpunk world, or a techno-libertarian crypto world, or an afro-futurist world, or one run by cozy cooperatives — but the multiplicity of such Eutopias, and their interconnectedness, means everything. Together, a thousand such islands of new ways of life can be lifeboats for millions or billions of people — and together, they can redefine the way the planetary system works."

(https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/protopia-beyond-utopia-8200a20b2c43)