"Suffer a Sea Change": Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia

I am not unaware that a threat of instant obsolescence looms over the present essay. To speak of the "politics of utopia" in the current conjuncture is to speak at a time when the waning of political investment in "the still unbecome" (Ernst Bloch, 1:202) threatens to deprive the phrase of any substantive meaning. Indeed, the kind of dialectical procedure through which the speculative fantasies of the past could be mined for traces not only of the rankly ideological but also of the persistently anticipatory has for some time been left to the labor of an obstinate few, bringing utopia to the sorry state of appearing either as a merely taxonomic category or, worse, a pejorative shorthand for what, from the viewpoint of late-modern sensibilities, are the all-too-modern shortcomings of Marxian dialectics: the teleological faith in "reason" and "progress," the unwillingness to open thought up to the injunction of irreducible difference, the insidiously authoritarian investment in what Zygmunt Bauman recently described as "the modern idea of designed and managed order" (Society, 231). The poststructuralist revolt against such articles of high modernist faith rendered "utopia" an unsavory means of describing the desire for alternatives to existing social life and experience. To the extent that it remained possible to speak of such desire amid the emerging sense that the mesh of relations in dominance was all-enveloping, it was preferable to draw not on the ostensibly consolatory and untroubled tradition of utopias but on the existence of real places where social norms could be "simultaneously represented, contested and inverted," to evoke Foucault's description of heterotopia (24).

A full account of the causes behind the latent, and sometimes explicit, dismissal of utopia in much late-twentieth-century theoretical inquiry exceeds the scope of the present essay. I will here restrict myself to dwelling on two of the methodological assumptions that have underwritten such anti-utopian "common sense." The first involves the tacitreduction of utopia to an iconic representation of society "in a perfected form" (Foucault, 24)—in other words, the advocacy of a surprisingly positivistic reading of what is at stake in utopic practice. Generically, such positivism tends to divorce utopia from the complex ensemble of relations of " filiation, supercession, predecession, complementarity, antagonism, parallelism, and even complete independence" (Holstun, 12) that constitute genre as an irreducibly historical rather than an inertly taxonomic concept. Formally, it works to gloss over the tension between the static temporality of description and the countermanding motility of processes of narrative figuration.¹ The result is that "content" is divorced from the historically delimited possibilities of formal elaboration at the cost of at once depoliticizing the literary dimensions of utopia and deformalizing its political dynamic (Holstun, 9).

Once deprived of claims to the kind of textual nuance and complexity to which "properly" literary forms are entitled, utopia is far easier to define in terms of a static and idealist ontology that is in fact already assumed by the mode of definition itself. This, in turn, allows it to be all the more easily sociologized—reduced, in other words, to a transparent and unmediated expression of a reified "worldview." Hence the tendency, crystallized in a work like Bauman's Society under Siege, to periodize utopia in strict conformity with the rise and decline of a modern Weltanschauung that is one-dimensionally Weberian: rationalist, overwhelmingly instrumentalist, and unwaveringly affirmative in its ameliorist ambitions. Despite its demurral from actual textual analysis, such periodization already implies a textual theory, whose main tenet is the ultimate foreignness of utopic textuality to the convulsions of late modern écriture. "Utopia," Bauman writes, "was the product of the Age of Engagement and Commitment": "Engagement in and to territory," "Commitment to . . . the preservation of the accident/risk/uncertainty free, ultimate order of the perfect society" (Society, 230). Figured as a cultural by-product of the hypostatization of "territoriality" and "finality" in so-called "solid" modernity (223), utopia...