Critics often interpret literary utopias as political plans or proposals without attending to their aesthetic qualities. Contrary to blueprint readings, the form of the literary utopia should not be read as mere “sugarcoating to the pill” (Morris, “Looking Backward” 353-4) designed to promote its effective contents—a series of social, political, and economic arguments (e.g., as in Woolf 240). In order to correct this kind of reductionism, we must locate the specific differences between the literary utopia and other forms of discourse: what does it mean that the utopian novel is literary? Jacques Rancière’s original and unconventional thinking provides a useful way of answering this question. While the utopian figures in much of Rancière’s writing, including extensive histories of the Saint-Simonians, his theoretical remarks on the subject are scattered, unsystematic, and slight. For example, he often uses the term in its colloquial and pejorative sense (i.e., a non-existent and impractical vision) or as another term for a spatial representation. Instead of focusing on Rancière’s direct comments on utopia, then, I will apply his more productive model of political aesthetics to the utopian novel, using News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest by William Morris as a case study. Applying Rancière to Morris, I will argue that the literarity of the utopian novel enacts a kind of linguistic equality through its erasure of the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate speech.
Much of Rancière’s thought centers on what he terms la partage du sensible, translated variously as “the partition of the perceptible” or the “distribution of the sensible.” This is the mechanism that determines the dividing line between
those one sees and those that one does not see, those that have a logos—a memorial speech, an account to be kept up—and those who have no logos, those who really speak and those whose voice merely mimics the articulate voice to express pleasure and pain. (Rancière, Disagreements 22).
For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible is a necessary precursor to any political intervention in that it defines the field of what we might even consider as political or apolitical. Thus, aesthetics—broadly, the determination of what can be perceived and counted as meaningful—is comparable to a Kantian “transcendental precondition” for political thought and action (Kollias 84). This leads Rancière to explore the ways in which the formal properties of art reinforce or disturb the perceptual apparatuses that enable different political systems.
Literature represents a particularly disruptive artistic form for Rancière. With literature, the positions of authorized speaker and intended listener dissolve so that it becomes “the new regime of writing in which the writer is anybody and the reader anybody” (Rancière, “Literature” 14). Literature effectively dismantles systems of legitimation or propriety. Literature is not modeled on the speech of the present “orator,” who respected and capitalized upon “social hierarchy” by “addressing appropriate kinds of speech-acts to appropriate kinds of audiences” (Rancière, “Literature” 14). Instead, the regime of literature is best characterized by the orphaned letter of Plato’s Phaedrus, which speaks indiscriminately and without the guidance and guarantee of a father (Rancière, “Literature” 14-5). For example, the military command proceeds from an authorized speaker (the commanding officer) to a select audience (the subordinate) and demands a proper response (unquestioning obedience). The poem, on the other hand, is utterly promiscuous, having no customary rhetorical situation or accepted interpretation. This has clear political-aesthetic implications. Because literature is no respecter of established roles or communities, it appears as equalizing or declassifying, a potential threat to any unequal division (Rancière, Aesthetics 39-40). Ultimately, literature produces a democratic aesthetic revolution, creating “a partition of the perceptible in which one can no longer contrast those who speak with those who only make noise” (Rancière, “Literature” 15).
It should be noted that literature is only a special case in a larger field of what Rancière calls “literarity” or the “excess of words” (Chambers 39). According to Rancière, literarity is not simply the property of the literate; the uncontrollable movement of words, our inability to permanently fix them within a system of legitimation or limit their use and reception to any class of speakers, is a “fundamental condition of the human animal” (Chambers 37). We can see this subversion in non-literary writing as well as in speech. Thus, just as later speakers would redeploy passages from written documents like the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in their political struggles, illiterate peasants of the medieval and early modern eras appropriated and altered the language of the Bible for their own: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” Literature, then, is not coextensive with literarity; it simply consists of a historical regime of writing which demands that we attend to literarity in its unruliness.
As literature, then, the literary utopia constitutes an attempt to deregulate and democratize political speech acts. The utopian, who is neither a politician nor a political scientist, usurps the position of a proper or official rhetor. More so than other forms of literature, the literary utopia directly poaches upon the territory of authorized discourse and this, I would argue, is why it often draws such scorn. Friedrich Engels registers the seeming arrogance of this move when he depicts the founders of utopian socialism as self-proclaimed “individual [men] of genius” whose discovery of the political economic “truth” is merely a “happy accident” that might just as well have occurred “500 years ago” (686). It is this indifferent and accidental quality that is the hallmark of the utopians—the utopian might be anyone at all. In other words, utopian discourse presupposes a radical egalitarianism, a redistribution of the sensible in which there is no division between legitimate and illegitimate speakers, appropriate and inappropriate subjects, or proper and improper audiences. Because the literary utopia is first and foremost a linguistic performance, the only prerequisite for entrée into utopian political discourse is the capacity for language, affirming what Rancière terms the “equality of speaking beings” (Disagreement 33). Engels’ critique of utopian socialism is stood upon on its head.
We can see an example of this rhetorical anarchism at work in the first lines of News from Nowhere, in which an unnamed “friend” begins the story of William Guest (Morris 43). We know nothing of the scene of enunciation for this story, only that it is spoken in the present moment (“Says our friend”) (43). In other words, it is a framing tale that provides no frame, serving only to highlight the lack of a stable context or rhetorical situation. The friend only tells us William Guest wants the story to be “told to our comrades and indeed the public in general” and that the friend “therefore proposes to tell them now” (45). This does not provide us much in the way of clues; friend’s very immediacy in the unspecified and therefore universal “now” suggests that she or he might be anyone speaking at any given moment to any group of people (c.f., Hegel 64). While the allusions to shared comrades and the presumed familiarity with which the friend refers to leftist political fractions might suggest that the friend is speaking to sympathetic socialists, even these points of orientation are undercut by the fact that Guest’s intended audience also includes “the public in general” (Morris, News 45).
The indeterminacy of the narrative voice is made even murkier by a strange rhetorical move the friend makes. At the moment William Guest awakes from his sleep into a future utopia, the friend announces that
I think it would be better if I told [these adventures] in the first person, as if it were myself who had gone through them; which, indeed, will be the easier and more natural to me, since I understand the feelings and desires of the comrade of whom I am telling better than any one else in the world does. (45)
In some ways this is an embellishment on a common distancing technique in literary utopias: the narrative of Utopia is related by Hythloday, whose words are then recounted by the voice of Thomas More. Here, however, the relays seem to become confused: William Morris writes of the narrator who tells of a friend who relates the story of William Guest, but in the first person, who describes his utopians. At each step of the way, any of these figures (William Morris, the narrator, the friend, William Guest) could be collapsed into one other. For example, William Guest might be William Morris’s pseudonym, or Guest could just as easily be a conceit of the friend telling his story. The text invites this ambiguity with the indiscriminate use of “I,” the anonymity of the two mediating storytellers, and the play of names (William Guest’s shared first name and generically allegorical surname). The first chapter sets up this aporia—only to reveal that resolving it is a matter of indifference. The novel does not return to the framing narrative and nothing seems to hinge on determining the text’s patrimony. By deliberately confusing the identity of the speaker, the novel emphasizes the Rancièrean errancy of the letter under literature. The story of utopia does not proceed from an accredited or even nameable source. Instead, the narrative appears on its own as a dream without a clear and certain dreamer.
News from Nowhere’s denial of any authorial propriety is perfectly consonant with William Morris’s politics. William Morris opposed the division of labor, including the division between those who plan work and those who execute it (Kinna 511). Morris shared this notion with Karl Marx and countless other socialist thinkers, who viewed the subdivision of production into ever-smaller tasks as alienating, narrowing, and immiserating. This position led Morris to envision a world in which workers might perform any job and take part in all steps in production without specializing or being tied to a particular role. It is appropriate, then, that the position of imagining this utopia is left unassigned. As Petts suggests, Morris viewed “all human beings as potential artists” (33). The role of utopian dreamer is therefore open for anyone to fill. This notion might rankle more orthodox Marxists who assign revolutionary tasks based on class (e.g., the revolution of the bourgeoisie produces formal democracy while the proletarian revolution will achieve communism). As we saw before, this indifference to class and historical conjuncture is part of why Engels opposed the lone genius model of utopian socialism. Indeed, Perry Anderson argues that Morris’s vision of classlessness would be impossible were it not for his “material substratum of…sensuous ease and freedom” as an artist and a man of great wealth (163). Yet, while utopian writing may be retrograde or idealist in that it fails to take into consideration the class position that produced it, it also opens up the field of social imagination to subordinate or even subaltern classes. The literarity of the utopian novel suggests a distribution of the sensible in which anyone might claim a voice, regardless of their position.
At times these discussions of equality may sound as if Rancière is denying the historicity and situatedness of the speaker and calling for a return to the bad faith universalism of the liberal or even Cartesian subject, with all of its attendant problems. However, it should be remembered that Rancière maintains that the subject is never a pre-given, nor does it exist outside of its conflict with the unequal ordering that he terms “police logic” (Disagreement 29). On the contrary, Rancière maintains that subjects are “created” by “modes of subjectification” which work by “transforming identities defined in the natural [i.e., normative] order of the allocation of functions and places into instances of experience of a dispute” (Disagreement 36). Workers or women, for example, already have a part in the police logic but only when they challenge the distribution of the sensible and attempt to claim an equal and intelligible voice, “logos” as opposed to “phone,” do they become subjects (Disagreement 36-7). Subjectification, then, is a historical achievement within a contingent system of power, perception, and language. In Samuel Chambers’ Rancièrean analysis of the politics of Mexican migrant workers in American meatpacking plants, he notes that “to speak from a fixed or given location within the partition of the sensible may be to not speak at all” (47). The attempt to speak as if one did not proceed from a given standpoint, to deny that one must always speak as an immigrant (or as a worker, an African-American, or a woman), therefore represents a strategic move not only within a particular local dispute but also within the broader politics of aesthetics. By extending linguistic equality to everyone and thereby universalizing logos, Rancière’s subjects make a partial step toward dismantling the distribution of the sensible that maintains a binary between rational speech and animal noise.
Another way that literature opens up the distribution of the sensible, expanding the range of who might speak and be heard, is its attack on expertise. One does not have to be a criminologist to write a crime novel or a historian to write historical fiction. This is particularly evident in the utopian novel, which describes an entire social system and therefore includes a limitless array of topics. Given the vast breadth of areas the utopia must cover, the utopian writer is necessarily an amateur and a polymath. The utopia therefore acts as an assault on what Rancière calls “enforced stultification,” a distribution of the sensible which “breaks the world of intelligence into two” and “installs the division between the groping animal and the learned little man, between common sense and science” (Ignorant Schoolmaster 7-9). The place we can best see the utopian breakdown of the categories of expert and inexpert is their representations of pedagogy. For William Morris, education is presented as an asystematic and open-ended process. There are no authorities whose aim is to determine and force the outcome of children’s learning (Morris 98) but, rather, children are “encourage[d]” to “learn to do things for themselves” (65). Since there are no teachers, there is no method of explication; children are allowed to simply “imitat[e] their elders” (68) in whatever tasks seem interesting to them. The distance between adults and children disappears while the confining spaces of the home or the schoolhouse are eliminated in favor of the forest (65) or the workplace (68). Meanwhile, adults remain in a permanent state of self-education, further erasing the distinction between learning and learned (98). As a result, childhood seems to dissolve altogether, so that children act as adults and adults seem as though they are enjoying a “second childhood” (132). This seems to suggest that Morris’s utopia gives us a preview of an intellectual “emancipation” which “repudiates the division between those who know and those who don’t, between those who possess or don’t possess the property of intelligence” (Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster 71). The novel’s denunciation of stultification, the distinction between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, represents a reinforcement of Rancière’s thesis of the fundamental equality of speaking beings and further works to sabotage the distribution of the sensible which would cast certain kinds of political speech outside of the realm of concern. Here there is no distinction between ignorant noise and learned discourse. By the same taken, Morris does not distinguish between the science and organization of the revolutionary vanguard and the irrational spontaneity of the masses they must “educate” (c.f., Lenin 82). Thus, in Morris’s account of Communist revolution, it is the workers’ history and experience—not the manifestoes of professional worker-revolutionaries—that provide the best “education” of the people (149-50).
It might be argued that this libertarian theory of self-instruction, while fairly common in utopian novels, is not an essential or universal feature of them. While this is true—a number of utopias do describe a division between intellectual authorities and subordinate students—I would maintain that the utopian novel itself represents a vehicle of emancipated teaching. Many theorists have viewed literary utopias as pedagogical tools. Drawing on E. P. Thompson’s analysis of William Morris, Ruth Levitas maintains that utopias provide an “education of desire” through the experiential, non-cognitive communication of “a radically different set of values” (124). This education allows us to break the stranglehold of “bourgeois common sense” and, ultimately, work toward the realization of utopia (ibid). Levitas’s model of utopian pedagogy does not imply that the literary utopia invites our agreement on a series of specific facts or propositions; we might accept the values of a given utopia without assenting to its particular institutions. Yet, as Perry Anderson points out in his critique of Thompson, it is impossible to separate desire from knowledge or values from beliefs: “moral awareness is not to be simply elided with affective sensation: it is always a matter of intellectual conviction as well” (164). What this suggests is that the education of desire is no different than any other school mastery—at best there is only a difference of emphasis. Indeed, this model of utopian pedagogy still frames pedagogy as a form of persuasion or propaganda, one that maintains a particular hierarchy (i.e., disciplined versus undisciplined desire) and aims to produce a consensus.
This is fundamentally different from the kind of laissez-faire education propounded in News from Nowhere, which rails against the coercion and paternalism implicit in schooling (Morris 97-8). Instead, the novel suggests that the student should learn whatever “his own inclinations impel him to seek,” even if that is contrary to what we might want him to learn (98). How, then, does the utopian novel provide the reader with the means and opportunity for auto-didactic learning? How is it that the utopian novel refuses to act as schoolmaster? It is its literarity that allows it to slip free from any pretense of learned explication. According to Hector Kollias, under Rancière’s conception of literarity there is a “loss of any given criteria for identifying and judging it” (84). That is to say, literarity suspends all principles of legitimation for both the production and reception of the word (Chambers 39). With this regime of writing, the word shucks off any guarantees of legitimacy and thereby invites its own dissensus. Whereas the proposal, the manifesto, or the lecture submits itself for approval, the literary utopia makes no referential truth claims and instead announces itself as fictive, as “utopian.” For all of its overt didacticism, we may still read the utopia just as easily as no place or the good place, as a hallucinatory dream or as an anticipatory vision. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most common response to the utopian novel is not acceptance but argument. This is not the result of imaginative resistance or some other flaw in the utopian method of persuasion—the literary utopia by its very form deliberately refuses to assert its own reality and impose its argument upon the reader, allowing her to engage in her own process of interrogation and construction without the tutelage of the authorized voice of the schoolmaster or the orator. In so doing, the literary utopia refuses stultification or any other hierarchical division of the distribution of the sensible.
In his most perceptive statement about utopianism, Rancière argues that utopia constitutes “the unacceptable, a no-place, the extreme point of a polemical reconfiguration of the sensible, which breaks down the categories that define what it is to be obvious” (Aesthetics 40). For Rancière, utopia functions in this way not because it can be set into “practice” and produce a specific radical change but, rather, because it appears as “‘unreal,’” as a “montage of words and images appropriate for reconfiguring the territory of the visible, the thinkable, and the possible” (Aesthetics 41). Whereas realist discourses demand a coincidence of opinion or at least shared terms, the literary utopia challenges the limits of what might be thought and said and in so doing provoke potentially infinite disagreement. Thus, News from Nowhere begins with a fractious argument and ends with uncertainty about the narrative it describes. There is a risk here. As Donald Rumsfeld suggested, “Democracy is messy.” The literarity of utopia might allow a democratic redistribution of the sensible, representing a dialectic movement toward the achievement of a concrete utopia, or it could produce an introverted and quietistic aestheticism stricken by the paralysis of perpetual indeterminacy.
What this antinomy indicates it that the freedom that aesthetics allows the literary utopia is also its limitation. By intervening on the level of the politics of perception, the utopia fails to take into account the structural and above all material constraints at work. That is not to say that the utopian author should be “doing something” instead of merely writing. Rather, the utopian does not consider the practical limits of any given rhetorical situation. This predicament is best exemplified by a series of exchanges between police officers and student protesters during the Mrak Hall occupations. Often, protesters would hail the police officers, asking them to join them in protest or, at least, to refuse to take part in the evacuation and subsequent arrests. The protesters knew full well that their speech would not be heard and counted as meaningful. Furthermore, they were also aware that the police officers were prevented from acting upon their private consciences by a variety of forces, including not only the everyday threats of disciplining, job loss, or legal repercussions but also the workings of ideology and the positionality of each officer. In other words, students spoke to police as if they were both groups of equal, rational, free speaking beings when in fact they were implicated in a system that constructed them as anything but. Rancière fully acknowledges that this equality is not yet achieved and may never be achievable. Instead, he describes equality as “a mere assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices implementing it” (Disagreement 33). He goes on to describe egalitarianism as a “one-off performance” (Rancière, Disagreement 34), a kind of “break” that is “antagonistic” to police logic (29). For Rancière, then, equality can never be “institutionalized” or “organized” (Disagreement 34). Rancière’s notion of equality presents itself as a kind of utopia. It functions in what Mark Robson calls the “world of the assumption, of the as if”—we may be contained within the police order, but we shall act on a “kind of fiction,” as if an egalitarian logic were now possible, as if all parties might be included and recognized, as if each subject possessed equal intelligence or discernment and could speak with equal validity (90). We can see a clear overlap between Rancière’s thought and Engels’s description of the utopian socialists. The utopian socialists—naïve dreamers that they were—worked under the false assumption that utopia can be achieved “by propaganda, and wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments” (Engels 687). In other words, the utopian socialists spoke as if we were already equal beings, free to be persuaded by anyone with a good argument. The obvious Quixoticism of this operating assumption should not lead us to scoff at the utopians—it should compel us to damn our own unfreedom.
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