What kind of Utopia would you like to live in?

- I've done my best here - Green Island   http://www.rudemacedon.ca/greenisland.html

The Utopian Vision of the Future: Then and Now - A Marxist Critique by Bertell Ollman

Having referenced that article. it's noteworthy that those in the Bolivarian Movement Towards Socialism in Latin America make specific reference to the use of Utopian ideals in the outline of their programs, policies, etc. They are making their Utopia.

Siamdave, Green Island looks pretty cool, but we could make ON just as cool... and BC and MB and...

Canada, 1968. "Can we start again, please?"

An eternal Pennsic works for me...

How about a socio-economic system that is not class organized? Maybe, you know, like Socialism. We can start there and see what happens.

Or maybe like the aboriginies of Australia, were there is no progress so that life will stay as close to the original time of creation as possible?

I would not want to live in a utopia.

I enjoy the diversity of my human experience far too much.

I do not think that diversity would exist if we had solved all our problems.

alien wrote:

Pants-of-dog wrote:

I enjoy the diversity of my human experience far too much.

Watching the wall-to-wall horror stories on the 6-o'clock news is part of your diversity.

Enjoy!

It would make more sense to address what I actually said, would it not?

Catchfire wrote:

What makes you think utopia is homogeneous?

The fact that I have never encountered a description of utopia that was not somewhat or entirely so.

Looking at alien's post #13, (and I am not choosing alien's utopia for any reason other than it is very accessible to everyone in this thread) we see a list of 13 factors that would be present in that utopia.

The trouble with that one is that my very good friend who is an absent-minded artist would have no apparent place in that "utopia", because she allows irrational things to inspire her way of interacting with the world. While her style of thinking gets us lost on the freeways of Vancouver Island, it also makes her capable of exploring creative fields of thought that I can only glimpse when I look at her works.

Catchfire wrote:

pants-of-dog wrote:

The fact that I have never encountered a description of utopia that was not somewhat or entirely so.

Well, then you didn't read my post earlier in the thread, or, apparently, anything by Ursula LeGuinn. Irrationality, diversity, pleasure, creativity: to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if these things aren't in Utopia, I don't want it on my map.

It is spelt LeGuin, and I assume you are alluding to The Dispossesed.

A society where people where not "allowed" to own private property on have locks on their doors. Ostensibly, they coul dhave, but social conditioning would have rendered the inidividual a pariah. I would not want to be considered an outcast simply because I really like using my Estwing 20 oz. hammer and not having people walk in on me when masturbating.

Catchfire wrote:

There is a difference, of course, between a Utopian program and Utopian desire. It's the latter which is more useful, more critical to building a better world, and the former which becomes visible to us as a series of elegant failures. To view a Utopian program as the culmination or totality of Utopianism in general, is a very short-sighted and defeatist state of mind.

I am not even sure that a utopian desire is useful. To me, it presupposes that we have some sort of agreement on what we want, or that we should be moving towards a specific goal. The desire for a utopia seems like a desire for simplicity, for an end to our worries and conflicts, for an end to those things that force us to become more than we are.

I do not want to stop growing and changing.

pants-of-dog wrote:

I am not even sure that a utopian desire is useful. To me, it presupposes that we have some sort of agreement on what we want, or that we should be moving towards a specific goal. The desire for a utopia seems like a desire for simplicity, for an end to our worries and conflicts, for an end to those things that force us to become more than we are.

I do not want to stop growing and changing.

It seems to me that you are operating under a very fixed, very restrictive idea of Utopia. I'd encourage you to revisit my post #4 in this thread and open up your definition of Utopia. As a horizon rather than an endpoint, Utopia is precisely about growth and change--or "becoming" in philosophical parlance. It is, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy, "singular plural" at once individual, unique, localized; and social, historical, universal.

There is a tendency to view Utopia (as Adorno mentions above) as some abstract impossibility, easily dismissable: "Oh, that's just utopian thinking." When, in fact, that is exactly what the capitalist (or call it hegemonic) ideology imposes on us to ensure its  own continuity and perpetuity. We should engage (Bloch argues) in concrete Utopia, rooted in historical realities, "militant optimism," and, above all, hope. Educated hope, in fact.

Indeed, this is the point you may have missed about Le Guin: there is no "utopia" as such in The Dispossessed; but it is nonetheless utopian. It is the truck and exchange between the worlds presented to us in the novel where we are to find our utopian horizon. It is in these interstices we will find a world toward which to strive--not some fixed schema offered to us by quick-fix midnight paid programming.

Catchfire wrote:

It seems to me that you are operating under a very fixed, very restrictive idea of Utopia. I'd encourage you to revisit my post #4 in this thread and open up your definition of Utopia. As a horizon rather than an endpoint, Utopia is precisely about growth and change--or "becoming" in philosophical parlance. It is, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy, "singular plural" at once individual, unique, localized; and social, historical, universal.

There is a tendency to view Utopia (as Adorno mentions above) as some abstract impossibility, easily dismissable: "Oh, that's just utopian thinking." When, in fact, that is exactly what the capitalist (or call it hegemonic) ideology imposes on us to ensure its  own continuity and perpetuity. We should engage (Bloch argues) in concrete Utopia, rooted in historical realities, "militant optimism," and, above all, hope. Educated hope, in fact.

Indeed, this is the point you may have missed about Le Guin: there is no "utopia" as such in The Dispossessed; but it is nonetheless utopian. It is the truck and exchange between the worlds presented to us in the novel where we are to find our utopian horizon. It is in these interstices we will find a world toward which to strive--not some fixed schema offered to us by quick-fix midnight paid programming.

In a utopia, would it possible to commit transgressions against others? if the answer is yes, then is it really utopia?

If it is no, then there must be some way of making such trangressions impossible. This necessarily restricts human freedom, which is in itself a transgression, which is impossible in our utopia.

So, if we define utopia as an endpoint, it is an abstract impossibility.

But let us look at your idea of utopia as horizon, or educated hope. I am not sure what you mean by that.

Just looking at the phrase "educated hope", I am not sure if it is necessary. For example, I have no idea what exactly all the problems are that trans-sexuals face in our society. It would be fair to say that I am uneducated in their plight. Nor am I hopeful that any great changes will be made. However, I will still support any and all efforts of trans-sexual people to have their rights and equality recognised. Furthermore, my lack of education in this area also precludes me from deluding myself that I know better how to help trans-sexuals than they themselves do.

Pants-of-dog wrote:

I would not want to be considered an outcast simply because I really like using my Estwing 20 oz. hammer and not having people walk in on me when masturbating.

Sounds like extremely selfish and unsocial behaviour to me. Lots of people prefer to share. And you know what they say about big hammers and small nails.

Fidel wrote:

Sounds like extremely selfish and unsocial behaviour to me. ...

Well, I am a spambot.

Catchfire wrote:

What's vague? "It"? I've only responded directly to your examples. This is a dismissal typical of hegemonic ideology which denies alternate modes of being and sociality: akin to Thatcher's "There is no alternative to capitalism." You've got to let go of the fixed, frozen conception you have of what constitues Utopia--it's simply no longer valid. It's not a program, it's not prescriptive, it's a horizon, it's futurity, and it's rooted in history.

An example:

Andy Warhol wrote:

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

In this famous quote by Warhol it would be easy to dismiss this pop artist as naively celebrating consumerism and alienated production, gullibly suckered by capitalist pipe dreams. But what Warhol detects, here and elsewhere, is something more in the act of sharing a coke with someone--that utopia exists in the quotidian. Warhol opens up a potentiality, a utopian horizon in a moment capitalist ideology would prefer to dehistoricize, close up and lock down: there is nothing outside the here and now. Warhol submits the possibility that a coke bottle might in fact represent a mode of being or feeling that is not quite here yet but nonetheless an opening. Of course, we must admit the possibility that this hope is naive, that it probably will be disappointed. But nevertheless, this move by Warhol is indispensible to the Utopian act of world transformation.

It's not unlike the wonderful poem by Frank O'Hara "Having a Coke with You," in which a simple, disposable and quotidian act, so part and parcel of the capitalist system, opens up the possibility of sharing same-sex love. For me, these moments are the true Utopias: concrete beads of time which promise the possibility of something more, the promise that things could be different. And those different modes of being could be anything, are anything: full employment, the freedom to fully engage one's sexuality, freedom from poverty, war, strife, sustainable living, etc.

To me it seems that this definition of utopia is simply an awareness of the possibility of good in the here and now. Would you agree with that definition?

Alien:

Sorry bro, but sane people can not make any system work.. How about a system of slavory?

Capitalism can never work no matter how sane humanity may be. It's a ttheoretical nightmare, that's why it has never brought what its proponants say it will.

Quote:

For Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere proper, as with the criteria the global financial institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgement on a country—does it have free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? The key to actual freedom resides rather in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed for effective improvement is not political reform, but a transformation in the social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, or about worker–management relations in a factory; all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by ‘extending’ democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain lie outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures can, of course, have a positive role to play. But they remain part of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose is to guarantee the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou was right in his claim that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire or exploitation, but democracy. It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations.

[...]

In such a constellation, the very idea of a radical social transformation may appear as an impossible dream—yet the term ‘impossible’ should make us stop and think. Today, possible and impossible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, we are told that ‘nothing is impossible’: we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films and tv series are available to download, space travel is available to everyone (at a price). There is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into the genome; even the tech-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into software that can be downloaded into one or another set of hardware.

On the other hand, in the domain of socio-economic relations, our era perceives itself as the age of maturity in which humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality—read: capitalist socio-economic reality—with all its impossibilities. The commandment you cannot is its mot d’ordre: you cannot engage in large collective acts, which necessarily end in totalitarian terror; you cannot cling to the old welfare state, it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis; you cannot isolate yourself from the global market, without falling prey to the spectre of North Korean juche. In its ideological version, ecology also adds its own list of impossibilities, so-called threshold values—no more than two degrees of global warming—based on ‘expert opinions’.

[...]

This is why Lacan’s formula for overcoming an ideological impossibility is not ‘everything is possible’, but ‘the impossible happens’. The Lacanian impossible-real is not an a priori limitation, which needs to be realistically taken into account, but the domain of action. An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible—an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today’s global capitalism.

Slavoj Žižek - A Permanent Economic Emergency

If I did end up living on the path to a Utopia, I'd want it to be structured(and I don't mean this flippantly)something like the "holodeck" on "Star Trek: The Next Generation"-that is, I'd want it to be a reality that everyone could adjust to fit her or his own desires for the best possible world.

If the Germans are making the beer, I'm in.

"What kind of Utopia would you like to live in?"

Planitia