La transformación

Preface

What follows is a continuation of what has become our ongoing dialogue about history and Utopia—about form, critique, and transformation. We choose to work in dialogue form in order to make space for our distinct cultural and geographical positions and voices. Also woven into our text and extending the discussion are the words and ideas of the contributors to this volume. In these comments, the events of 11 September 2001 and be-yond provide an immediate point of departure, but we make no claim to encompass that complex event in what is more pointedly a discussion about the persistence of Utopia.

TM: On 11 September 2001,1 saw dystopia come off the page and screen once again. When the passenger planes were flown into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, the "concrete dystopian" (Varsam) reality which most people already suffer daily was condensed into a single morning. For the terrible destruction in New York and Washington, D.C., was not an iso-lated event. While it was a pointed act of fundamentalist terror, its perpe-tration did not arise from some ahistorical hell. Rather, it grew out of a very real, worldwide situation for which the economic logic of capital and the arrogance of the U.S. superpower are deeply to blame.

In this world situation, as the essays in our volume each argue in their own way, the Utopian impulse that would say no to "widening inequalities,

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persistent armed conflict, ecological destruction and the tightening grip of 'globalization,' or more properly, global capitalism" and yes to "a real transformation of the global social and economic system" (Levitas) in the interest of everyone and not a privileged few has, since the conservative backlash of the 1980s and the onset of neoliberal hegemony in the 1990s, already been silenced and attacked on one hand and co-opted on the other.

And so, in the aftermath of that day in September—in the imploded space between the "phantom Twin Towers," as Rosalind Petchesky put it, of "ter-rorist networks and global capitalism"—the anti-utopian denial of possi-bility and enforcement of the new order did not suddenly begin. Rather, it continued along its established path, now opportunistically drawing on people's genuine grief and fear to lock in an ideological common sense that valorizes the centrality of the market along with an unquestioning, patri-otic loyalty (3). For me, those phantom towers now stand as signposts for a locus of power that refuses any vestige of a radical Utopian horizon.

Yet, as the horrendous material and ideological dust clears, we again see manifestations of critique, and perhaps movement toward transforma-tion, "as people persist in trying to find better ways of living": "People are protesting, including protesting about the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of 'security.'... People are prepared to say 'not in my name.' So that perhaps .. . there is hope—the hope which Bloch, again, construed ' n o t . . . only as emotion .. . but more essentially as a directing act of a cogni-tive kind" (Levitas, quoting Bloch, her emphasis). As that dust clears, and new, and stronger, expressions of Utopian thought and action emerge, per-haps we can better grasp the analytical and anticipatory value of the criti-cal dystopias that offered their warnings, and possibilities, as early as the 1980s.

RB: Your comment about dystopia coming off the pages and screen once again is certainly true for me too. For a moment, I had the impression I was watching a film, but unfortunately it was no film that we were watching on 11 September. The political climate of these past years, with the shift to the Right almost everywhere, makes me feel as if I were living in a dystopia.

Therefore, I think that today, when Utopia is entering one of the most anti-utopian of times and communication seems to have broken down if not become impossible, lucidity is most needed. In light of this, I would like to address Darko Suvin's comment that "the discourse around utopia/nism is not far from the Tower of Babel" and that we need a tool kit "to talk intelli-gibly." I'm reminded, once more by the events of this last year, that com-munication has become a real challenge these days. But I'd like to think of critical dystopias as a common ground from which to resume

communica-Dystopia and Possibilities • 235 tion, and to offer a quotation from George Steiner's After Babel as another possible image of hope:

After Babel argues that it is the constructive powers of language to conceptual-ize the world which have been crucial to man's [read humanity's] survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face of death [read Anti-Utopia]. It is the miraculous [read Utopia]—I do not retract the term—capacity of grammars to generate counter-factuals, "if'-propositions and, above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual. We endure, we endure cre-atively due to our imperative ability to say "No" to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited 'otherness' for our consciousness to inhabit. . . . [T]he affair at Babel was both a disaster and—this being the ety-mology of the word "disaster"—a rain of stars upon man [read humanity], (xiii-xiv, xviii)

Perhaps we can be helped by this image: as a critical or open dystopia, with its disasters and representations of worse realities, retains the potential for change, so we can discover in our current dark times a scattering of hope and desire that will arise to aid us in the transformation of society. A need for clarity, a sort of Raymond Carver "what we talk about when we talk about Utopia," and a desire for (or "a dream of) a common language" (Adrienne Rich) with which to speak inform this project, in order to attempt to under-stand what we are living and to resume a possibly transformative dialogue.

Indeed, I agree that "the exploration of alternatives is a transformative pro-cess in itself" (Sargisson), and in this I find one of the strengths of the thought experiments that we deal with in our volume. In this respect, it may be true that some offer primarily personal responses to—almost personal refuges against—dystopia, and that "the personal is not political enough"

(Levitas). But I think that, today, we nonetheless cannot afford to lose the personal. I would add, in defense of an ambiguous, if not an altogether happy, ending, that this is precisely one of the reasons why critical dystopias are important: to show us that the opening of hope toward Utopia (not as at-tained and finished, but rather as reachable and in process) is a way to make Utopia part "of the process which must be entered into now, rather than postponed always beyond the horizon" (Levitas).

This is not to say that I don't agree with what you and others say about the co-optation of Utopia. Too often, in these times, Utopia has been con-flated with materialist satisfaction, and thus has been commodified, deval-ued, abused, and tarnished. It is important to recognize this because

"people suffer today so that others can live in the material eutopia of the world's developed countries" (Sargent). I have recently seen, in an Italian magazine, an advertisement for a series of jewels called "utopia." The ad, as

236 • Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan

often is the case, plays on contrast at the level of both image and text: a young woman in "hippie" clothes wears the sophisticated jewels. The text says that while some Utopias fade, this "utopia" is here to stay. It all seems part of the Disneyfication strategy that is going on around us, where Dis-neyland is another way to sell us "utopia" as a materialist dream, that which

"commodifies desire, and in particular the desire for happiness as signifi-cation or meaningfulness" (Suvin). After all, consumerism has come to represent the contemporary modality of happiness. But if it is particularly evident today, such a modality was already present some thirty years ago, as the critique of the affluent American society in a counter-epic like Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren makes clear (Donawerth). In a way, the Dis-neyfication strategy is not that different from the dream sold to Italians by the present government: the pursuit of individual happiness, which is none other than material success, is embodied by the proliferation of posters of today's prime minister's face (altered so that he appears younger, less bald, and leaner) during the electoral campaign. "Vote for me and my dream will be true for you too"—this is the message behind the campaign.

This strategy reduces Utopia to the Land of Cockaigne, by suggesting that Utopia is something that will magically happen rather than come about by hard work, if only we leave it up to him. Such manipulation of reality makes me feel like a citizen of a dystopian novel, but what I really am is a citizen of Anti-Utopia.

TM: You get right to the heart of the matter. As Suvin puts it: "Utopian re-flections, in and out of fiction, have now to undertake openings that lead toward agency: action." In these times (since 1980, right now?), how can the world be made otherwise? In the face of the commodincation of every-thing and the growing suppression of dissent, how can a critical perspec-tive develop? How can we work together (you and I, but also all of us) not only to develop a critical language and perspective but also to join in devel-oping transformative actions (since I agree here with Raymond Williams's distinction) that are actually oppositional and not only alternative? As someone who cut his political teeth in the civil rights, anti-war, and social-ist-feminist movements of the United States in the 1960s, I agree with you about the importance of the personal as the point from which not only re-visioning but also radical choice proceeds. However, I also take Ruth Levi-tas's point about the personal not being political enough. Whether the Utopian moment of the 1960s movements failed, or was, temporarily, beaten, the subsequent "fragmentation of those Utopian projects into local issues and identity politics" (Fitting), however necessary in their own right, resulted in a pullback into a micro-politics (what gets expressed and explored as enclaves in critical dystopias such as Octavia Butler's) that in

Critical Dystopia and Possibilities • 237 the long run is not sufficient to take on the macro-system of global capital and its military mercenaries in the United States. What has happened—as seen in the anti-capitalist protests, but also in the globalizing labor, human rights, indigenous, and ecological movements—is precisely such a shift to a more totalizing level of analysis and a larger scale of alliance politics.

While we now might well be seeing a stronger form of these tendencies than existed in the 1990s, it is to the credit of the critical dystopias that, rather than hiding out in a resigned pessimism, they tracked the possibili-ties of just such alliances—and did so in ways that held on to the deep and dialectical relationship between personal choice and systemic change (see Cadigan, Butler, Robinson, Piercy, Le Guin, and films such as The Matrix and Pleasantville). It may well be time for new forms of Utopian thought and imagination, but while that time has been coming, the work of the dystopian turn did its job in generating a collective and forward-looking structure of feeling in a social context that worked against such a future-oriented optimism in every possible way.

And, yes, the anti-utopian "market utopia" prevents the possibility of an emancipatory memory (of which you write) and a radically new form of everyday life (see, for one example, Jacobs on Butler's consideration of a transformed humanity living out a new posthuman collectivity), by taking up "utopia" and selling it back to us as an already-achieved dream. The use of "utopia" in a recent Irish ad goes a step further than your example in that it is the name given to a new type of bank loan: now, not only can you immediately live utopia but you can have the "perfect" overdraft to afford that living!

Regarding Disneyland, I'd also think of how New York City itself has be-come a theme park: beginning in the years of Rudolph Giuliani's regime of gentrification and zero tolerance, but now, after 11 September, entering a new phase, as Ground Zero is bounded by scaffolding erected to accom-modate tourists. Perhaps, in the immediate aftermath of the 11th, a critical dystopian openness existed in the wake of the bombing, as possibilities for new ways of knowing the world (and the place of the United States in it) hovered in the political unconscious of the newly victimized population.

But very soon (especially as government and media spin took over) the po-tential for Utopian vision growing out of an atmosphere of genuine grief and honest re-assessment hardened into an ideological amber of patrio-tism and vengeance, frozen in the spirit of the past, as in the evocations of Pearl Harbor, and closed to the opportunity for a new clarity regarding the place of America (and its own "dream") in the world.

On yet a darker note, this moment of capitalist intensity has so claimed and exploited Utopia, at the "end of history," that some of the biggest cor-porations (e.g., Enron, Worldcom) fell prey to their own non-realistic,

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"utopian" over-reaching. With the collapse of such mega-enterprises, we see capital exposed in its lies and thievery on a grand scale. The rush to wealth in the 1990s has consequently produced its own terrible event.

Here, however, it is not a crashing plane but a crashing market that is evis-cerating savings, pensions, and the tax base, and eliminating jobs—conse-quently impoverishing millions of people. This dystopian event, on top of the U.S. military response to 11 September that has resulted in killing hun-dreds of Afghan civilians in its anti-terrorist campaign, offers evidence of an anti-utopian reality produced not only through fundamentalist rage but even more by the ruling economic and political power.

RB: Since you refer to your personal experience in the 1960s, I will try to add another personal reason for my interest in dystopia. I have noted that Phil Wegner thinks that the best critical dystopias are "very much about their own erasure," "self-consuming text[s]" doomed to disappear, while Peter Fitting wonders whether "our attention to the critical dystopia is mis-placed." Suvin, on the other hand, chooses the term "fallible" to refer to the open and critical dystopia of the 1980s and 1990s. I don't want to sound at all prescriptive, and for this reason I see our volume and these provisionary conclusions only as points of departure for an ongoing dialogue. However, I do think that it is important to engage with the critical dystopias of these last decades, as this is what the times have produced. After all, Bertolt Brecht was writing in 1939, "Yes, there will also be singing/ About the dark times."

But I also think that dystopia as a genre speaks to me more than other forms because of "when and where I was born." Personally, 1968 does not belong to my memory. Rather, it is 1970s Italy with its "leaden years" (anni di piombo) of terrorism that forms my background—the years between 1976 and 1980 when almost 100 people were killed and many more wounded in terrorist attacks by the Brigate Rosse and similar groups (Ginsborg 511-521). During that time, many more lost their lives through bombings perpetrated by extreme-right terrorists together with state ap-paratuses, which had their beginning with what has been called the strage di stato in Milan's Piazza Fontana, on 12 December 1969. So the 1960s with their Utopias have less to say to me than do dystopias, which is another way of saying that I have little room for nostalgia of a better time.

I need stories that speak to me, and I am reminded of a similar state-ment by Marge Piercy that can help us recognize the value of the critical dystopias:

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. I have been at it ever since. To me it is an important task to situate ourselves in the time line so

Critical Dystopia and Possibilities • 239 that we may be active in history. We require a past that leads to us. After any revolution, history is rewritten, not just out of partisan zeal, but because the past has changed. Similarly, what we imagine we are working toward does a lot to define what we will consider double action aimed at producing the future we want and preventing the future we fear. (1-2)

Therefore, I don't think that our attention is misplaced if it means that things will change, if these works point us toward change. We need to pass through the critical dystopia to move toward a horizon of hope. That's why I think that to call these works "fallible" is to reduce their potential, impact, and criticism. It writes off the intentional critique of our society that they enact and portrays them as false at worst, ineffectual because erroneous at best. These, on the other hand, are works that through the portrayal of dystopian worlds can lead to an "education of desire that focuses anger, a view of the present as defamiliarized and historical, and a radical hope for better ways of living" (Donawerth). Next to the education of desire, these works also enact an "education of perception" through the affinities to the

"concrete dystopias" they represent (Varsam).

TM: It's tricky, but important, to sort out the nostalgic from the continu-ing useful when lookcontinu-ing back at a period of intense political activity like the 1960s. Certainly, society was in motion, and the whole world was watching. Societal affluence (albeit barely trickling down to many) and (in a contradictory manner not always acknowledged) the security of U.S.

hegemony (expressed positively, at least as some of us initially took it, in Kennedy's "ask . . . what you can do for your country") gave to those of us who were to become activists a confidence that we could stand up to the power structure and change it. In this way, the systemic wealth and power that we opposed gave us a sense of Utopian possibility that we turned against that very system. Or, to put it in the spirit of the critical Utopias of the 1970s, one (conservative) Utopian moment, that of postwar American hegemony, led through its contradictions to another Utopian trajectory that overtly opposed it (here, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed becomes the most prescient of the Utopian revivals). One way of understanding the 1960s movements is therefore to see them in terms of a concrete Utopian politics of choice that worked at both the personal and systemic levels. Cer-tainly, at the level of the personal, choice was central to the claiming of a fuller, more authentic (to use the existentialist language of the time) life:

hegemony (expressed positively, at least as some of us initially took it, in Kennedy's "ask . . . what you can do for your country") gave to those of us who were to become activists a confidence that we could stand up to the power structure and change it. In this way, the systemic wealth and power that we opposed gave us a sense of Utopian possibility that we turned against that very system. Or, to put it in the spirit of the critical Utopias of the 1970s, one (conservative) Utopian moment, that of postwar American hegemony, led through its contradictions to another Utopian trajectory that overtly opposed it (here, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed becomes the most prescient of the Utopian revivals). One way of understanding the 1960s movements is therefore to see them in terms of a concrete Utopian politics of choice that worked at both the personal and systemic levels. Cer-tainly, at the level of the personal, choice was central to the claiming of a fuller, more authentic (to use the existentialist language of the time) life: