Introduction
The Reality of Imaginary Communities
Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.
It seems to me that we are living through a long revolution,
which our best descriptions only in part interpret. It is a
genuine revolution, transforming men and institutions;
continually extended and deepened by the actions of millions,
continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by
the pressure of habitual forms and ideas. Yet it is a difficult
revolution to define, and its uneven action is taking place
over so long a period that it is almost impossible not to get
lost in its exceptionally complicated process.
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution
Taking up the critical project Raymond Williams announced in the early
1960s of reinterpreting and extending the ideas and values of the past
“in terms of a still changing society and my own experience of it,” this
book examines some important dimensions of the changing relationship
between space and community during the “long revolution” of Western
modernity.1 In addition to contributing to a reconsideration of modernity in terms of its “spatial histories,” this book also does a number of
other things: most important, it looks at the origins and subsequent adventures of the singularly modern construct of the nation-state; it investigates some of the difficulties that arise for those in the twentieth century who attempt to imagine new spaces, communities, and histories; it
reflects on the potentialities of different kinds of representational and
narrative practices, questions made especially important for us today in
the light of new electronic literacies and information technologies; and,
finally, it explores some alternatives to contemporary methods of studying modern literature and culture.
Drawing together these various agendas is the particularly rich and,
as I will show in the following pages, uniquely modern literary genre of
the narrative utopia. There has been a surge of interest in the question
xv
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xvi
Introduction
of utopia lately, signaled by a number of important new studies, the publication of a major new narrative utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars
Trilogy (1993–96), and the staging of an international exhibition in
Paris and New York in the year 2000.2 I believe all this interest points
toward a recognition of the deep relationship between utopia and the
experience of a modernity now widely understood to be in the midst of
a thoroughgoing transformation. While the story that unfolds in the following pages centers on the institutional and formal development of the
genre of the utopia, this generic history is understood to be inseparable
from a history of modernity in which the works comprising this important genre play such a significant role. Throughout this book then, I argue for the “reality” of the imaginary communities realized within these
earlier texts. They are not real in that they portray actual places in the
world; rather, they are real, in the sense suggested by Etienne Balibar in
the epigraph to this book, in that they have material, pedagogical, and
ultimately political effects, shaping the ways people understand and, as
a consequence, act in their worlds.3 In short, narrative utopias serve as
a way both of telling and of making modern history, and in this lies their
continued importance for us today.
As many readers will recognize, the title of this book also recalls that
of Benedict Anderson’s influential study of the rise of the “imagined
communities” of the modern nation-state.4 Anderson too describes such
communities as “imagined” precisely because while most of their members will never encounter one other, each believes they all share some
deep, transhistorical bond. Such a belief has had tremendous consequences for the history of the modern world, a fact made evident almost
daily in newspaper headlines. Liah Greenfeld has called this imagined
community the “constitutive element of modernity,” and much of the
story I tell in the following pages focuses on the formation and the subsequent history of this construct.5 I argue that the narrative utopia plays
a crucial role in the constitution of the nation-state as an original spatial, social, and cultural form. Beginning with the work that founds the
genre, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), there has been a continuous exchange of energies between the imaginary communities of the narrative
utopia and the imagined communities of the nation-state, the former
providing one of the first spaces for working out the particular shapes
and boundaries of the latter. These imaginary communities are “nowhere,” as the etymological root of the term utopia bears out, precisely
to the degree that they make somewhere possible, offering a mechanism
by which people will invent anew the communities as well as the places
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Introduction
xvii
they inhabit. The utopia’s imaginary community is thus not only a way
of imagining subjectivity, but also a way of imagining space, thereby
helping the nation-state to become both the agent and locus of much of
modernity’s histories.
If the particular social and cultural institution known as the nationstate has a history, then like any other history, it will be marked by intense moments of upheaval, contradiction, and change. The dawn of the
twentieth century witnessed one such moment, in which, beginning in
the early decades of this century, the narrative utopia became one of the
places where a crisis in this conception of the subject and object of
modernity was first registered, a crisis that has taken on a new significance and intensity in our own present. The second half of this book explores the ways some of the most influential narrative utopias of the
twentieth century navigate this new social and cultural terrain, as modernity enters into a new phase, marked by a growing consciousness of
the place of the nation-state in a global cultural and social space (although, as I argue, the spatial histories of modernity, from their very beginnings, always already take shape on a world stage). The questions
these works address are crucial ones: If our social and cultural space is
now global, what will be the nature of the communities, the subjects of
history, that will operate within it? How do we imagine such a space?
And how might we speak its history? A discussion of the formal evolution of the narrative utopia thus also offers a way of bringing into focus
some of the monumental changes that occurred earlier in this century in
both the practice and representation of space.
In addition to offering new ways to read the histories of modernity,
my study of narrative utopias also aims to alter our understanding of
how we use diverse narrative forms to make sense of—indeed, to make
— our world. Such a reconsideration becomes especially important as
we attempt in the new millennium both to imagine innovative forms of
political activity and to come to grips with the immense possibilities
made available by emergent information technologies. At the heart of
this book lies my contention that the narrative utopia is a specific kind
of representational act, and also a particular way of conceptualizing the
world. I use the term re-presentation here in the sense given by the German word, Darstellung, with its double implication of representation
and presentation, encompassing both practices of reproduction and
those of a much more active performance of the world. The specificity
of the narrative utopia’s representational and cognitive practices is too
often overlooked in many other discussions of the form that tend to see
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xviii
Introduction
it either as a lesser kind of literature or a branch of social theory, and
thus relegate it, on the one hand, to the specialized domains of the literary critic or, on the other, to those of the intellectual historian or political scientist.6
Neither characterization adequately grasps the nature of the work
performed by the utopia. The representational practices of literature
give expression to the unique and concrete lived experiences of collective or, in the case of most modern texts, individual ways of being in
the world—that is, of particular phenomenological inhabitations of its
spaces. The representational practices of theory, on the other hand— or
what Louis Althusser calls “science”—attempt to perceive in a coherent
and systematic fashion the abstract principles organizing the totalities in
which these experiences take place. And never, apparently, do these two
meet. However, the narrative utopia, along with the larger class of representational practices of which it is a part, occupies a middle ground
between the phenomenological concreteness of the literary aesthetic and
the abstract systematicity of the theoretical, working instead to develop
a conception or, to use a term whose significance will emerge later in my
discussion of the groundbreaking work of Louis Marin, a figuration of
a space whose lived experience and theoretical perception only later become possible. Thus, in a very real way, first mapping the terrain that
will be inhabited by literary art and theory, the narrative utopia serves
as an in-between form that mediates and binds together these other representational acts.
It is precisely this sense of the utopian text as engaging in a particular kind of praxis, a specific representational activity, that I mean to emphasize through my use throughout this book of the phrase narrative
utopia. This too flies in the face of much of the received wisdom about
these works. Utopias are too often read as static descriptions of a place,
real or ideal, with “description” being implicitly understood to be the
“other” to the temporal, or process, orientation of narrative. However,
I argue that in forms like the narrative utopia, description itself serves
as what in other contexts we think of as action or plot, so that social
and cultural space and communal identity slowly emerge before our eyes
by way of a process Roland Barthes calls “semiosis.” With this term,
Barthes means to distinguish a whole class of texts—providing what
might seem at first glance an improbable link between the writings of the
Marquis de Sade, Charles Fourier, and Ignatius Loyola—that, unlike
the mimetic imperative driving literature and theory, dislocate the problem of reference. Far more significant for these kinds of texts is what
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Introduction
xix
Barthes describes as the “performance of discourse,” the very activity of
making the world through language.7 Thus, the classical Enlightenment
figure of the map, with its presupposition of a singular “God’s-eye view”
upon a fixed and stable space, is an inappropriate one for the narrative
utopia. Narrative utopias are more akin to traveler’s itineraries, or an architectural sketch, tracing an exploratory trajectory, a narrative line
that, as it unfolds, quite literally engenders something new in the world.8
This implies a dramatic temporal reorientation as well; for if both literary and theoretical representations approach the narrative present in
terms of the past, attempting to grasp it as some form of a completed
whole, semiotic itineraries or performances like those of the narrative
utopia conceive of the present in terms of the future, as something that
is incomplete and continuously coming into being. That is, the present,
its concerns, desires, and contradictions, rather than being the end of the
representational practices of the narrative utopia (as in those of literature or theory), serves as the very raw material from which the narrative performance will generate something original. These productive
performances are what made these works so electrifying for their contemporary audiences, confronting them with all the shock of the new.
In this book, I want to recapture some of this energy and excitement
and thereby help us, too, to begin again to think of the possibilities of
the new.
Both this “in-betweenness” and the orientation toward the future
account for the cultural pedagogical force of utopian texts. The particular narrative utopias I discuss at length in this book—most centrally,
More’s Utopia, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We,
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four—were, along with numerous other representatives of the
genre that I touch on more briefly (including, among others, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, William Morris’s News From Nowhere, Arthur
Dudley Vinton’s Looking Further Backward, Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, H. G. Wells’s A
Modern Utopia, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World), deeply influential in their particular times and places, contributing to, and often directly shaping, debates over a wide range of social and cultural concerns. Indeed, one of the most exciting aspects of studying these works
in their contexts is witnessing the passionate and engaged public discussions they often provoked. However, in addition to these immediate effects, many of which I elaborate in the coming chapters, the very narra-
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xx
Introduction
tive practices made available by utopian texts helped transform how
their readers understood and acted in the world in far more profound
ways as well. By inserting something heretofore unknown in the world
—an original conception, figure, or what one of More’s contemporaries
called a “speaking picture”—the narrative utopia generates the cognitive space around which new kinds of lived experiences and theoretical perceptions form. Thus, understanding the past work of narrative
utopias has real consequences for how we live and perceive modernity
in the new millennium.
Each of the chapters of this book is organized in such a way as to
form a kind of “in-between” representation as well, being at once theoretical—mobilizing and exploring the points of contact between a wide
range of different discourses—and historical, focusing on how various
narrative utopias engage with the concerns of their time and place while
participating in the ongoing, long revolution of modernity. Thus, this
study in its very form calls into question some of the conventions of current intellectual work, and attempts to clear a space for a new kind of
relational-spatial study of cultural texts. I explicitly address these issues
in Chapter 1, where I begin by reconsidering what is still too often perceived as the discredited work of genre criticism. I argue first that problems arise when we assume that genre study involves only the creation
of textual taxonomies. In order to circumvent these problems, I elaborate an alternative approach to genre that reads it as a fundamental aspect of the self-interpreting “being-in-the-world,” or Heideggerean Dasein, of any text. Such a self-reflexive awareness becomes evident both
in the ways each text in the genre engages with its predecessors and in
its particular remaking of the generic institution in response to its particular historical context. Thus, in a manner reminiscent of Heidegger’s
phenomenological analysis, my approach to genre sets aside the impossible goal of describing definitively the set of necessary and sufficient
conditions for membership in the genre—which would be nothing less
than a quest after ontological essences—and instead explores how such
a critical self-awareness defines the genre’s existence. Like all such institutional beings, genres exist in time, and thus genre provides a means of
reviving a kind of historical thinking, stressing the relationship between
cultural texts located in different times and places, unavailable in many
contemporary critical reading strategies, including those of the New
Historicism and a good deal of cultural studies. Through this discussion,
I hope to contribute to the project of constructing a richer, multidimensional approach to any cultural text.
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Introduction
xxi
The next section of Chapter 1 examines in more detail the particular
nature of the representational practices of the narrative utopia. Central
to my discussion at this point is the work of the French social philosopher and theorist of space, Henri Lefebvre. Only recently becoming
more widely known to an English-reading audience, Lefebvre’s innovative studies of the spatiality of contemporary life have been central to
many of the most influential recent discussions of modernity and postmodernism. I show how Lefebvre’s crowning achievement, The Production of Space, and the dialectical tripartite model of space that it develops provide a powerful tool for rethinking the practices of the narrative
utopia. However, as I emphasize throughout this book, the spatial mapping of modernity takes place alongside an equally important critical
assault on already existing practices and spaces. I thus conclude this
chapter by examining some of the theoretical work—including that of
the most significant twentieth-century student of utopia, Ernst Bloch—
that highlights this dimension of the form. What emerges is a dialectical
understanding of the relationship between the temporal and spatial dimensions of the narrative utopia, a dialectic that, I maintain, is at the
heart of the experience of modernity as well.9
Having established some of the theoretical stakes involved in this
project, I begin Chapter 2 with an exploration of the “origins” of this
generic institution. Although its roots extend much further back into
older traditions of “utopian” thought and representation, the modern
narrative utopia has a distinct moment of birth in the 1516 work by the
English Christian humanist Thomas More, which at once introduces a
new word, literary institution, and conceptual problematic into the European cultural imagination.10 However, I show that it is not More’s
original act, but rather a process of “re-authorings” of his narrative undertaken by its subsequent readers—readers among whom I number
More himself—that set into place the institutional being-in-the-world
of this genre. What these various readers recognized in More’s performance was a new tool that enabled them at once to bring into view and
participate in the making of a nascent modernity.
One of the most effective theoretical descriptions we have of this particular representational activity is to be found in Louis Marin’s important work, Utopiques: Jeux d’espace. I also focus in this chapter on
Marin’s elaboration of the operation he calls “utopian figuration,” a
way of mapping, through the narrative elaboration of the “speaking picture” of the utopian text, some of the most significant dimensions of an
emerging modernity. However, for all the suggestiveness of Marin’s
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xxii
Introduction
analysis, the conception of modernity deployed in his text is marked by
a crucial blind spot; thus the latter part of this chapter explores another
possible way of reading the project of Utopia. Marin implicitly accepts
the assumption that the history of modernity is one with a telos, gradually moving toward the realization of a single, universal, sociocultural
space and subjectivity, wherein all forms of contradiction and conflict
have been abolished. Such a vision is shared by theorists of the modern
on both the political left and right, from the most enthusiastic socialist
visionaries to the most despairing theorists of iron-cage disciplinarity
(and continues today, for example, in many invocations of the implicitly
teleological concept of “globalization”). In contrast to this view, I argue
that modernity is in fact constituted by a fundamental contradiction
between universalism and particularism, between the production of
homogenous empty space— capital, the money form, labor, and the
juridico-political subject—and the formation of new kinds of local identities and spaces distinguished by what Slavoj Žižek calls “organizations
of enjoyment,” the “real, non-discursive kernel” materialized through a
particular set of social and cultural practices and understood as under
constant menace by the Other.11 The brilliance of More’s originary text
lies in its mapping of the relationship between these twin dimensions of
an emergent modernity, of the constant movement between universalization and particularization, or the de- and re-territorializations of social desire. Thus, in addition to the abstracting and universalizing tendencies so effectively articulated by Marin, we see suddenly exploding
forth in More’s work a radically new and deeply spatialized kind of political, social, and cultural formation: that of the modern nation-state.
The success of More’s work in founding this new genre also helped to
establish the nation-state as the increasingly naturalized expression of
both the space and the subjectivity of modern history. In Chapter 3, I begin to explore the fortunes of this representational practice during the
course of the last century. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the
link between the imaginary community of the utopia and the imagined
community of the nation-state had become so firmly established that
later expressions of the form now also serve to recontain the anxietyproducing clash of publics that occurs within the spatial and cultural
boundaries of the national community. This is exactly what unfolds in
Bellamy’s phenomenally successful Looking Backward (1888). Writing
in a moment when the earlier definition of the United States “Republic”
was being challenged by the new class, racial, and ethnic “publics” that
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Introduction
xxiii
were then coming to inhabit it, and attempting to walk a line between
conservative desires for a retreat to the past and radical calls for the violent overthrow of the present, Bellamy uses the institution of the narrative utopia as a way of imagining a new kind of American national community. While presenting an important early figuration of the contours
of emerging practices and institutions, such as those of middle-class consumerism and professionalism, Bellamy also develops a profound reflection on the relationship between collective identity, national space, and
memory. His text presents a program for overcoming the fractured and
conflicting “organizations of enjoyment” of the late-nineteenth-century
United States by way of a willed forgetting of those memories and histories that bind individuals and communities to what he views as the
dead weight of the past.
While Bellamy’s text offers us one last look backward at the older
project of the narrative utopia, the two texts that I investigate in Chapter 4, Bogdanov’s Red Star and London’s The Iron Heel (both 1908),
present a fundamental and far-reaching reconsideration of the practices
of this generic institution. Both texts were written as deeply political interventions, and I argue that they succeed precisely to the degree that
they also challenge the established practices of the genre. Indeed, I maintain that all of the great twentieth-century works that participate in the
generic institution of the narrative utopia are involved in the project of
remaking the form so that it will be adequate to a changing experience
of modernity. Responding to the political crisis initiated by the defeat of
the 1905 Russian Revolution, and negotiating the concerns of their particular social and cultural situations (for London, especially the growing
fissure in the American labor movement between the IWW and AFL),
Bogdanov’s and London’s works also mark a growing awareness of the
ways that the processes of modernity have effectively sutured global
space into a single totality. And yet, neither text can offer an adequate
representation, or cognitive mapping, of the kind of collective subjectivity, a universalized organization of enjoyment, that might coincide with
such a space. Thus, both works refocus the project of the narrative
utopia on the figuration of the kinds of collective subjects that will mediate the passage between these two spatial orders of modern history.
In effect, these two works sever the old link between the imaginary community of the narrative utopia and the imagined community of the
nation-state. In Bogdanov’s text, what takes the place of the nation as
the subject of modern history is the idealization of the Proletariat that
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xxiv
Introduction
he elaborates in a monumental philosophical system, the “Tectology,”
while in London’s work, there occurs a much more concrete figuration
of the mobile, imagined collective subjects found in places as diverse as
the bureaucracies of the corporations and the “state capitalist” socialist
parties.
This points as well toward another concern that I explore in this
chapter: the role of the intellectual within these imaginary and imagined
communities. While I suggest that the narrative utopia has been centrally concerned with the place of intellectual labor from More’s founding text onwards, this issue takes on an even greater urgency as the form
itself undergoes the dramatic reconstructions we witness in the twentieth century. In an important way, these two utopias illustrate the central
tension in the vision of the role of the intellectual that will be much
fought over in the coming decades: a withdrawal from action that arises
from the determinist idealism hinted at in Bogdanov’s work and the determining vanguardism of an intellectual bureaucratic elite promoted in
London’s text.
The reevaluation of the older project of the narrative utopia continues with Zamyatin’s We (1920). If the older expressions of the genre
present a singular narrative of the spatial history of modernity, one
bounded within the confines of the nation-state, Zamyatin’s text offers a
vision of multiple competing “possible worlds” or historical trajectories
for modernity. Equally significant, as a consequence of the events in Zamyatin’s own time and place in the years following the Soviet revolution,
he comes to regard the nation-state as not only an insufficient space for
the potentialities of modernity, but as an actual detriment to its realization: in We, the borders of the nation-state now mark a possible horizon
of modern history itself. As a way of navigating around this blockage,
Zamyatin develops a brilliantly original, permutational schema of possible expressions of the narrative utopia form and, indeed, marks the
place of two of the most influential expressions of the genre that appear
in the years following the Second World War: the “anti-utopia,” and the
“open-ended” utopia that proliferates in the early 1970s. A powerful example of the latter is to be seen in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974),
and in the second part of Chapter 5, I explore the significant and little
remarked upon convergences between her influential work and Zamyatin’s earlier text. I do not want to underestimate the significance of Zamyatin’s and later Le Guin’s rigorous maintenance of this “horizon” of
possibility, especially in light of the perceived political closures of each
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Introduction
xxv
of their historical situations. Indeed, I show that something quite similar is accomplished on the philosophical front in the contemporary
work of Bloch. However, the failure of these texts to offer any concrete
figuration of a new spatiality is not without its own cost, something similarly stressed by Antonio Gramsci, whose insights I invoke in the closing pages of this chapter.
Exactly the nature of this price is evident by the time we arrive at one
of the single most influential narratives, utopian or otherwise, of the
twentieth century: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This narrative
marks another crucial turning point in the history of this generic institution, negating the modernist play of “possible worlds” we see in Zamyatin’s and later Le Guin’s texts and offering in its place what I call,
drawing upon the work of Karl Mannheim, a new form of the “conservative utopia.” Orwell’s celebrated text, like another key work of this
moment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, perceives the mass media and industrial forms of global cultural
production as a threat to the various autonomous organizations of enjoyment—rational, aesthetic, subjective, domestic, and national—that
had been so central to the histories of modernity. Their destruction, Orwell concludes, will bring the project of modernity to a close. Moreover,
in Orwell’s view, it is the rise of what Walter Ong later describes as
“secondary orality”—in the form of the new global informational technologies—that now undermines the more than four-century-long hegemony of print literacy, as well as the forms of the imagined community
that arose alongside and, indeed, through it.12 Thus, diverging from the
institutional tradition of the narrative utopia, Orwell’s work imagines
a short-circuiting of the forward momentum of modernity. Nineteen
Eighty-Four attempts to delink the values of modernity from the very
ongoing process of modernization which gave rise to these values in the
first place, and promotes instead a nostalgic return both to the older
form of the imagined community found in the English nation and the
kind of “literate” intellectual critique formed within it. Thus, while
providing a double assault on the new mass-media culture and the kinds
of “engaged” intellectuals we see, for example, in London’s work—a
double critique that will play a crucial role in the political intellectual
struggles of the Cold War world—his text offers a figurative glimpse of
what will become one of the dominant forces of our post–Cold War
present: the explosive emergence of nostalgic and antimodern nationalisms. And in mapping the antinomies of a homogenous global mass-
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xxvi
Introduction
media and commodity culture and the violent particularisms of the new
nationalisms, Orwell’s text effectively blocks out the horizon of our own
present experience of modernity.
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As I hope will become evident, I conceive of my book itself as another
kind of experiment in utopian figuration, or of cognitive mapping: an attempt to create at once a historical and theoretical overview of the work
of past narrative utopias, and to produce my own “speaking picture” of
a history still in formation, and hence “not yet” available for a final
summation. And as with the various narrative utopias I discuss throughout this book, I imagine this project as an invitation to see the histories
of modernity in a new way, so that we might also begin to imagine anew
the space of our present and future. As this book will show, such imaginings are indeed real, and they will shape, as much as the imaginary
communities of the past, the paths we embark upon in our attempts to
make our futures.
Wegner, Phillip E.. Imaginary Communities : Utopia, The Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity,
University of California Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/empire-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223089.
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