Philosophy for Artists: From Utopia to the War Machine
Week 1: Utopia
In 1516, Sir Thomas More published a book of fiction, written in Latin, titled in full:
On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia
It is known today by the shorter title, Utopia, a word that More coined.1 Today, when we hear the word utopia, it connotes a variety of meanings: a place that is good, perfect, or “the best” (as More puts it in his title). The word also implies a sense of unreality: a place that is too perfect or too ideal to exist. Or, in other cases, a place that does not exist because it is in the future.2
Interestingly, it is this latter sense of unreality that More chose to capture in his coinage. “Utopia” is a combination of two ancient greek words. The “u-” is taken from the prefix “ou-” (οὔ)–indicating a negation–and “topia” is taken from “topos” (τόπος), meaning place.3 Thus, literally, a utopia is a no-place. A place that is not and perhaps one that cannot be.
Yet, as Utopia’s editor George Logan notes in his introduction to More’s text, readers who would have at the time recognized the etymology of utopia would also have recognized another homonymous Greek compound, namely eutopia. In this case, topos is prefixed with eu-, meaning “happy,” or “fortunate,” or “good.” Thus “eutopia” means “good place.”4
More himself explicitly recognizes this pun in a poem at the end of Utopia:
Six Lines on the Island of Utopia Written by Anemolius, Poet Laureate, and Nephew to Hythloday by His Sister
No-Place’ was once my name, I lay so far;
But now with Plato’s state I can compare,
Perhaps outdo her (for what he only drew
In empty words I have made live anew
In men and wealth, as well as splendid laws):
The Good Place’ they should call me, with good cause.5
Although this coinage is relatively unknown, it captures what is, in my experience, the meaning that is popularly intended when using the word “utopia.” The utopian city is a perfect city, the best sort of place to live.
Of course, even if the word “utopia” was coined in the 1500s, the concept of an ideal city or place has been around for much longer. Arguably, the most famous of these utopias is the one alluded to by More in his poem, Plato’s Republic.6 Just as in More, we see in the Republic that the concepts of eu- and u- topia are linked. That is to say that it is precisely the best state that is and must be an ideal state. In the Republic, Plato tries to answer the question “what is justice?” by setting out to describe what justice would look like, first, in a city and then in a soul. In the text, the character Socrates’ justification for this order of investigation is that justice will be “easier to see” in a city than in a soul.7
Central to this discussion of justice is Plato’s theory of the forms. For Plato, Justice (and any other form) is an idea, an ideal, that the material, perceptible world can only approximate. Part of the reason for this is that the perceptible world is always in flux. In contrast, the ideal forms are always stable, eternal, and unchanging. Because of this, things in the material world can attempt to approximate the forms, but they will never perfectly match the form. They will always remain imperfect approximations.8
So the Republic, as an ideally just city, is, by necessity, only an ideal. In building an actual city we can attempt to approximate this ideal, but we will never get there. Actual cities will always be failures as they are subject to the flux of the sensible world.9
This is, of course, also true for ourselves and our own souls. We are imperfect beings with souls that are themselves imperfect. The perfection of ourselves is just an ideal, an ideal that the rational part of our soul might be able to grasp, but not one that we will ever be able to achieve ourselves, in the sensible, embodied world.
In contrast to Plato, Michel Foucault, in his text “Utopian Body” (originally delivered on French radio) begins with the body. For Foucault, the body is its own place, its own topology, that may be navigated and discovered. The notion of a utopian place develops out of our experience with the body. Thus, for Foucault, the utopian body comes first, and only after the idealized, utopian place.
We will see at the end of reading Foucault that the consequence of this is that utopia is not based on intellectually grasping some grand structure, some abstraction conception of what the ideal city is that is then applied to the city to either condemn it. Rather, the idea of a utopia is developed out of the intimate experience of our body. In this sense, it is not ideal but existential.
At first, Foucault observes, it might appear that the body and utopia are opposed. Our body is something that determines us or, more dramatically, traps us. We are condemned to live with it, whether we like it or not. In contrast, utopia offers us an escape from the determinations of the body, to a place where we man exist freely, without limitations. While I might have been born here, in the United States, at this time, in this society, with this ethnicity and body, utopia offers a place where all of this can be overcome. It is a place where I don’t have to be in this body or this society or even this world. Utopia offers freedom whereas the body, it seems, offers the opposite.
Let’s begin by looking at how Foucault begins his piece:
This place that Proust slowly, anxiously comes to occupy anew every time he awakens: from that place, as soon as my eyes are open, I can no longer escape. This place of no escape, this place in which we find ourselves every time that we wake up, is our body. . . . My Body is the opposite of utopia, that which is never under different skies. It is the absolute place, the little fragment of space where I am, literally, embodied. My body, pitiless place.10
The “pitilessness” of the body is that it traps us, anchoring us to a particular place that is always here, “never under different skies.” In this place of the body, we have a determinate set of qualities. Every morning I get up and see this old visage fixed in the mirror: “thin face, slouching shoulders, myopic gaze, no more hair—not handsome at all.”11 I am stuck here. But the imagination of a utopia seems to offer us an escape to elsewhere.
But taking this thought further, Foucault argues that utopia appears to be the opposite of the body, even against it. Whereas our fleshy bodies are determined and unfree, a utopia is a place where I can be free of these determinations and therefore free of this body. Foucault writes,
My body: it is the place without recourse to which I am condemned. And actually I think that it is against this body (as if to erase it) that all these utopias have come into being. The prestige of utopia—to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without a body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. . . . It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporial body.12
Utopia is a place without limitation, one where we are free of all of those things the limit us in this world. It is a frictionless world where dreams can come true. Because of this, utopia is not only a non-place, it is also a non-body. The ideal city might be one without cars, a place of bikes and walking. But it is also a place where bodies don’t necessarily break down. A place where I can fall down a mountain and get up again. It is a place where people don’t bald and teeth don’t rot. In this frictionless space, the landscape and body morph and mutate to satisfy our every whim, both an impossible non-space and non-body.
This idea of the utopian body—that it is a rejection of the shortcomings of the physical, sensible body in favor of a non-body—is perhaps most obviously attested to by the christian soul. The soul is perfect. While the body may die and rot, the soul can live forever. Where the body can be corrupted with disease, may lose limbs, needs food and water, the soul is pure and can be purified just in case it does become corrupted.
“But perhaps the most obstinate, the most powerful of those utopias, with which we erase the sad topology of the body, has been . . . supplied to us by the great myth of the soul. . . . It functions in my body in the most mervelous way: it resides there, of course, but it also knows how to escape. It escapes from the body to see things through the window of my eyes. It escapes to dream when I sleep, to survive when I die. It is beautiful, my soul: It is pure, it is white. And if my body—which is muddy or in any case not very clean—should come to soil it, there will always be a virtue, there will always be a power, there will be a thousand sacred gestures that will reestablish my soul in its primary purity. It will last a long time, my soul, more than a”long time,” when my old body comes to rot. Long live my soul! It is my body made luminous, purified, virtuous, agile, mobile, warm, fresh. It is my body made smooth, neutred, rounded like a soap bubble.13
In christianity, the utopian body becomes something that each of us has inside of us, our soul. And this perfect soul stands in stark contrast with the dilapidated flesh that begins to wither and rot as time goes on. Next to the luminous soul, our fleshy body begins to appear bad. The flesh is something that we have to endure while looking forward to the day that we are granted release from it.
But, this story, that imagines utopia simply as a rejection of the body, it not quite right. It does not capture the complexities between the body and utopia. As Foucault notes, the body has its own “phantasmagoric resources.”14 That is to say, the corporeal body is complex, contradictory, mysterious and strange enough in itself that there is no need to locate the utopian body out there, in the soul. Utopia, in fact, is not really a rejection of the body at all.
Without needing to posit the soul, that ethereal, more perfect entity that is separate from the body, the body itself seems to contain both visible and invisible things. Things that are sensible and insensible.
In one sense, the body is clearly visible. It is that thing that people see when I present myself to the world. It is that thing that others can look over from head to toe, that other can spy on. It is that which can always be watched.
And yet, in another sense, it is invisible: I have the back of my head. It is there, I know it. I can feel it. And yet, it too is for the most part invisible to me. My back my arm my feet my jaw my teeth. They are all mostly invisible. To be sure, I know them with precision, I can operate them expertly. And yet they are entirely unnoticed.
Isn’t this body light, imponderable, and transparent? Nothing is less thing than my body.
I become thing…fantastic and ruminated architecture
==There is no need for a soul==
It is enough that is am a body to be both transparent and obaque, visible and invisible, life and thing.
Utopia was born from the body. The model was the body.
I really was wrong before, to say that utopias are turned against the body and destined to erase it. They were born from the body itself, and perhaps afterwards they turned against it.
Trans: ==Take the case of Tattooing and ornamenting ourselves==
==Tattoos and Clothing as induction into a secrect, invisible world.==
To tattoo oneself, to put on makeup or a mask, is probably something else: It is to place the body in communication with secret powers and invisible forces.
And if one considers that clothing, sacred or profane, religious or civil, allows the individual to enter into the enclosed space of the monk, or into the invisible network of society, then one sees that everything that touches the body — drawings, colors, diadems, tiaras, clothes, uniforms, all that — lets the utopias sealed in the body blossom into sensible and colorful form.
And perhaps, then, one should descend beneath the clothes-one should perhaps reach the flesh itself, and then one would see that in some cases even the body Itself turns its own utopian power against itself, allowing all the space of the religious and the sacred, all the space of the other world, all the space of the counter world, to enter into the space that is reserved for it. So the body, then, in its materiality, in its flesh, would be like the product of its own phantasms.
==the body is always elsewhere==
In the world, I am the center. I am that thing outside of the world around which all else is organized. The zero point. Things are there for me. I am not of the world the world is of me. The things in the world are there for me.
The things in the world surround me, there are there for me to do with what I want. I smell the floers, i make a crown, i become queen of the neighborhood. I put on the guitar and become star of stage and screen. But
But in the corpse and mirror, I am confronted by the fact that I am a thing, along side these objects, with a discrete set of facts. I was living with the sense that everything is for me, but in the corpse and the mirror, i realize that i am an object for other people, and as an object I am not free. I have determinate qualities, i have this body that i must present myself to others in. Before, i could transform myself into queen, into rock star, but i look in the mirror and see that I am not that.
The body then, while it is the source of utopia, it is not utopia “pure and simple.” It is a utopia that can close in on itself.
It is precisely because the body can imagine these other places place, these other place that are out there, it is precisely beacuse of this power that these imaginations can then be toppled by the image of this place that the mirror definitively gives us.
I wanted to be beautiful, I thought myself beutiful but I look in the mirror and it tells me: not handsome at all. The mirror takes it away from me.
In a way, erotic love is like the mirror and even the corpse. In it, we find ourselves as an object, and indeed an object for another person.
But unlike the mirror and the corpse, it is not an elsewhere. It is not in the image of a mirror. It is not the corpse which I will never actually experience myself to be. It show me my body here and now. And it shows it to me in a loving embrace. It “seals up” the utopia like a mirror, telling me how things are, but in the embrace of the other, these aspects of myself are encountered through a loving embrace. I come to accept my body here and now. My body is not taken away from me as in the mirror, but is given back to me here and now.
More, Utopia, xi.↩︎
See, e.g., Bostrom, “Letter from Utopia.”↩︎
See the LSJ entry for οὐ γάρ and for τόπος↩︎
More, Utopia, 11.↩︎
Ibid., 117.↩︎
Like many aspects of More’s utopia, this poem raises interesting questions. For one, it implies a reading of the Republic that takes Plato’s discussion to be limited to an ideal city. But it also neglects to mention Plato’s other text, The Laws, which is explicitly the second best city, likely because it is a city that can be real. Does More think that his city is better than this Platonic one? Does he think that this city in the laws is still too ideal?↩︎
If it seems strange to you that justice in the city would be the same thing as justice in a person, you’re not alone. Scholars have long been interested in this move that plato makes.↩︎
See, e.g. Cornford’s commentary Plato, Republic, 59.↩︎
Plato, Republic.↩︎
Foucault, “Utopian Body,” 229.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid., 230.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎