Canadian Journal of Sociology Online January-February 2006
In this brief paper, I build on a subtle and wrongly neglected conception of utopian consciousness to frame the work of two interesting contemporary utopian thinkers. I also contrast this lively intellectual experimentation with a prevalent fixation on the supposed loss of utopian possibilities. The points at issue may be summarized by the question: just what kind of place is utopia?
The conception I am recommending derives from Karl Mannheim, whose work on utopia we generally think we know well enough to dismiss (1936); and the present-day utopians I am introducing are Sanjib Baruah (2002; 2003a; 2003b) and Jerold Zaslove (1992; see Angus 2001). I refer to Mannheim's conception of "utopia as discovery process," to borrow a characterization developed by Paul Breiner in a recent article (2004). Baruah stands out because of his methodological use of utopian projections, and Zaslove, because he finds resources in the legacy of anarchist federalism to shape a lively utopian commentary on the normally so disillusioning issue of mobilizing constitutional practice against the helpless and amnesiac dissolving of communities. The motto, finally, under which I would like to criticize much hand-wringing about the supposed present-day loss of utopia is "Exile from Utopia as Kakatope," borrowing a term from a phenomenological study of bad, debilitating places (Walter 1988).
The familiar textbook Mannheim is the author of an elusive analytical distinction between ideologies and utopias contained in one of the chapters of Ideology and Utopia, with utopias logically distinguished from ideologies only by the most uncertain criterion that their "transcendence of being" somehow empowers actions that change society in the direction of the vision that they articulate. Mannheim next offers readings of several historical types of Utopia, only loosely connected to this definition, now taken as an account of the irrational, volitional kernels embedded in contrasting perpectives; and he closes the chapter with a dark prophecy of an end of the human will to history, as a result of the processes of rationalization exemplified by the article itself, which expose and therefore undermine the utopian, aspirational dimension of experience [Erfahrung]: "The disappearance of Utopia brings about a static objectivity, in which man himself becomes an object. [Das Verschwinden der Utopie bringt eine statische Sachlichkeit zustande, in der der Mensch selbst zur Sache wird]." (Mannheim [1929] 1965: 225)
Because this rhetorical prognostication appeared at the very end of Ideologie und Utopie in its original version, some think that it expresses the point of the book as a whole. But if the book is properly read as a collection of essays, with its main weight on the central chapter on Politics as Science [Politik als Wissenschaft], the passage appears more appropriately as a passing tribute to the cultural pessimism of Alfred Weber, to whom the utopia essay was dedicated. For Mannheim's sociology of knowledge as such, the investigation of utopias is only an incidental and compared to the study of ideologies an underdeveloped interest. Its treatment in Ideologie und Utopia is a prime example of the inconsistent experimentation that Mannheim defends in his preface. In the extensive article on Sociology of Knowledge [Wissenssoziologie] in Vierkandt's Handwörterbuch der Soziologie a year later, Mannheim's brief for professional recognition, the term Utopie never even appears.
Yet these doubts about the role conventionally assigned to utopia in Mannheim's sociology of knowledge does not mean that utopian consciousness is unimportant to Mannheim's sociology. His encounter with it belongs rather to his larger project of political education [politische Bildung] of which Wissenssoziologie is only a part. And in that context, the question of utopia proves to be one of the most important themes of his collegial but fundamental disputation [Auseinandersetzung] with Hans Freyer, his fellow rebel against Leopold von Wiese's narrow and defensive conception of sociology as academic study (Loader and Kettler, 2002).
The intellectual relationship between Mannheim and Freyer is intimate and complex, notwithstanding the basic differences that will eventually see Freyer as a loyal but unsuccessful suitor for National Socialist favor and Mannheim as emigrant. (This is, incidentally, only one of the many instances of this kind that must be better understood in the next phase of Exilforschung.) Both are convinced that the teaching of sociology is integral to the formation of a political consciousness able to move beyond the "crisis" which both believe marks the political present; and Mannheim during his years as Frankfurt professor adopts Freyer's telling designations for his own teaching, "life-science method" [lebenswissenschaftliche Methode] and "sociology as science of the actual" [Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft]. And they cite one another's work on utopia with every mark of respect.
Freyer was by far the first in the field. In a pioneering article published in Deutsche Rundschau in 1920, Freyer expounds the "logic of utopia." Drawing on his work on Hegel, he depicts utopian thought as the projection of a "third Reich" of ethical effectiveness corresponding to and superceding the moralistic "second Reich" of Kantian duty. Freyer identifies three interrelated formal elements of utopias. First, as the articulation of a scientific understanding of the forces that must be held in balance to constitute a perfect order, utopia must be a closed and insulated system. Second, the system must also be protected from change: it represents an end to history. Third, the utopian order cannot depend on coercive political instruments to maintain itself. He highlights the unfailing utopian argument, "the utopia that produces the citizens it requires" [daß Utopien die Bürger, die es brauche, selbst erzeuge]. Freyer expounds More, Campanella and Plato as three representative utopians, emphasizing the utmost seriousness of the utopian project and indeed its necessity in the development of human consciousness. Its decisive limitations, however, become clear with the question of the means the ways to the goal [die Wege zum Ziel]. In the nature of the case, this cannot be a matter of bargaining with the powers that be. So the choice comes down to persuasion or cannons, alternatives that are equally incoherent. Freyer pauses for an appreciate glance at Marx's attempt to evade this contradiction, but abruptly announces "Enough of Marx. [Genug von Marx.]" The point is that utopia presupposes a knowledge of history as a whole, and there cannot be such knowledge. Action can only be the free decision of the individual, with its purposes a matter of volitional choice taken in full awareness of uncertainty.
Freyer is often presented today as if this anticipation of current rejections of utopia were his last word. But even in the 1920 essay there is a final paragraph that foreshadows his future development. He says that the individual who recognizes all the intellectual weaknesses of utopia but who nevertheless decides to enlist the wills of others to a common cause by mobilizing his fantasy and theirs by a utopian projection is not guilty of faulty thinking [Denkfehler]. He is, rather, grounded in a right grounded in will [Willensrecht], irrefutable by any argument, " eternally valid as a creative form of practical reason and as a way of striving towards a stronger, healthier, happier human kind. [ewig-gültig als eine schöpferische Form der praktischen Vernunft und als ein Weg jenes Strebens nach dem stärkeren, gesünderen, glücklicheren Menschentums.]" This existentialist option becomes the hallmark of Freyer's thought.
Mannheim's reply to Freyer is already implicit in Mannheim's actual commentary on the utopias analyzed in his essay, but it is made clearer in the context of his university thinking after 1930, to be found in his 1930 introductory lectures, recently recovered, as well as in his 1932 article on the teaching of sociology, presented at a conference where he and Freyer combined against von Wiese without uniting on the point of sociological education (Kettler and Loader 2001). First, there is a clear distinction between utopian constructs as such and utopian consciousness, with the former understood as a stylized precipitate of the latter. While the utopian constructs may be static and closed, as Freyer claims, proof against the experimentation essential to practical human activity in a divided society, the utopian consciousness may be a searching, experimental and a vital mode of experience, a first response to the breakdown of practical social meanings. Utopian consciousness is continuous with sociology, properly understood, culminating in an open system of dialectical knowledge dedicated to responsible political action. Confronted with Freyer's express rejection of Mannheim's project of de-absolutizing both ideologies and utopias in 1930, as well as Freyer's provocative proclamation that "a true will is the foundation of true knowing" ["wahres Wollen fundiert wahres Wissen"], Mannheim emphasized the openness of utopian consciousness to social knowledge notwithstanding its grounding in a more or less sublimated experience of religious ecstacy. Mannheim traces Freyer's views to his affinity to fascism, an affinity among certain intellectuals who resort to reprimitivization as a response to the disorienting experience of distance from all self-evident meanings, an attempt to deny what they know that is doomed to end in hysteria. In the stilted English of his 1935 contribution to the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Mannheim summarizes his conception: "that the utopian fiction constitutes an integral part of the spiritual and intellectual equipment of the different social groups, and by orienting their activity in terms of this reality transcending element these groups, each in its own way, discovers social reality."
Peter Breiner expresses regret that Mannheim's exile in England abruptly ended his exploration of utopia at the most critical point, where it had to distinguish between the "political science" objectives of sociology of knowledge, to transmute ideology into realistic political understanding, and, in Breiner's words, "the utopian impulse, to act beyond the given 'reality' as a discovery process for what is politically possible." I have argued elsewhere that Mannheim's projects had a sweeping constitutional and educational ambition which he never abandoned, and which may itself be called utopian (Kettler; 2000) and his now scorned or forgotten design of Planning in an Age of Reconstruction has been called a "utopia of the right" by a scholar who knew him well (Kettler and Meja, 1995). Yet Breiner is certainly right that Mannheim failed to amplify or refine his conception.
For our aim of learning from Mannheim rather than expounding him, two points are important. First is his rejection of his own earlier facile formula about the end of utopia. Second is his openness to utopia as a corrigible and experimental component of a sociology oriented to political education. Those are key contributions to our understanding of utopia.
When I read the current literature bemoaning the impossibility of utopia, on the other hand, I am reminded of the refined chatter [geistreicher Klatsch] of an exile that has grown stale with waiting for something that can in the nature of the case never come again and that probably never existed at all. Where and when was this land of utopias? Exile is a miserable state. It is not uncommon today to celebrate the status of exile, as a metaphor for a unique blend of freedom and insight. This trivializes the reality of human suffering for the truly excluded. As Imre Kertsz has shown with regard to the experience of the camps, subjection to evil is itself banal. Nina Rubinstein's book, published some seventy years after the author submitted it to Karl Mannheim as a dissertation, brilliantly calls attention to the impairments that may accompany exile, notably an estrangement from history (Rubinstein 2000; Kettler 2002). E.V. Walter has coined the concept of kakatope for places that foreclose the very possibility of experience (1988). The posture of exile from utopia strikes me as being such a sterile place.
In my own closest circle of academic acquaintances, I can think immediately of a thinker whose inquiries utilize utopia as discovery process and, indeed, of a second one whose work is oriented by projections surprisingly similar to those which are theoretically reflected by the first. I'll begin with the second because theoretical explications of utopian moments may distort the concrete immediacy which distinguishes utopian consciousness from other kinds of regulative ideals. My colleague, Sanjib Baruah, writes about one of those bloody and intractable situations that mark our time and that make many of us profoundly uncomfortable about the very topic of utopia. Yet Baruah finds that it is impossible to think at all about the border provinces of northeastern India without connecting, first, with an ecological literature that projects these areas as potential zones of nature conservancy and sustainable development, and, second, with a literature of experimental federalism that distances the region from the exigencies of state. The former perspective clarifies the threat posed by the political economy of development, and the latter, the insoluble contradictions of the national security state in such regions.
In his recent political writings informed by utopia, Jerry Zaslove juxtaposes two situations as his points of departure, the missed opportunity of German constitutional transformation at the time of unification and the unending Canadian constitutional drama turning on questions of ethnic diversity and national maldefinition. To read both situations anew, Zaslove draws on a transfigured adaptation of Kant's Enlightenment vision, one that unexpectedly uses some of the darker pages of modern literature to construe universal respect for human autonomy (human rights) as a matter of creating space for the deepest self-engagements and the most tactful mutual encounters. Concretely, this perspective divorces constitutional politics from legality. Himself active in both communitarian experiments in inter-ethnic relations and associations for mutual aid among artists, he pushes the possibilities of intransigence vis vis state order while affirming the conception of the political project as a constitutional one.
What distinguishes my radical federalist examples of utopian consciousness is that neither pretends to some kind of scientific closure in the manner of static utopias and that neither imposes itself as some sort of wholistic irrational will, in the manner postulated by Freyer. They are working utopias. The antique models of utopia cannot help us with the logic of such constructs, whatever their charms as distant places, except insofar as they are indeed conceived as places, topological sites of human experience and not simply spatial coordinates. It is probably this quality alone that justifies the adjective utopian for the strategic projections I have cited as contemporary examples, and Mannheim's insights into this extended sense of the concept makes him an apt guide.
http://www.cjsonline.ca/soceye/utopia.html
January 2006
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