More's Utopia: Historically Bound

A tradition of utopian writing, in which an ideal state or ‘other worlds’ are portrayed in order to cast a light on contemporary society, runs through English and European literature. The idea of utopia can be traced back to around 380 BC and Plato’s Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system, and discusses the concept of ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ worlds. The word recurs in a modern context in Sir Thomas More’s 1516 work Utopia, where he too sets out a vision of an ideal society. The meaning of utopia - literally ‘no place’ - indicates that the perfect state may be an unattainable goal, and it is often depicted via satire and parody. There are two notable editions of More's Utopia in the Brotherton Library's Special Collections; the first is a 1893 edition, printed by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press in a limited edition of 300 (see image), the second is an early edition, published in 1518 by the famous printer and publisher Johann Froben.

Utopia by Thomas More (Kelsmcott Press)

This second copy of Utopia forms part of the Howard de Walden Collection. The Roundhay Hall catalogue shows that by 1926, Lord Brotherton had purchased 117 volumes from the library of Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis VIII, Baron Howard de Walden (1880-1946) for his own collection, which he later bequeathed to the Library. While the works themselves were published between 1471 and 1889 (although most date from the 16th and 17th centuries), many of the collection were bound early in the 20th century with Rivière bindings. These sought to recreate binding styles that were contemporary with the period of the printed work, in-keeping with the fashion at the time. The firm of Rivière, active in London between 1840 and 1939, was famous for the quality of their workmanship, and their work was prized by collectors. However, although the subject requires further research, it has come to light that the techniques used were not always accurate so that in some cases the binding reveals more about the binders' knowledge of historic binding than about the binding styles themselves.

Perhaps, then, the ideal of the perfect binding, much like the ideal of the perfect society envisaged by More's Utopia, remains elusive and ultimately unrealisable. The mixing of memory and desire, quoted famously in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (see also the Memory-Technology-Utopia post on this blog), reflects that impulse to delve into the past in the hope of creating something perfect for the future, even if a sense of history becomes distorted the effort.

This post adapts text from the booklet Visions of the Future: The Art of Science Fiction by Paul Whittle and Liz Stainforth.

Memory-Technology-Utopia

Or, Can We Salvage the Future?

[The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of writing, which forms part of my PhD research]

‘Why are there no utopias today?’ is Judith Shklar’s opening gambit in her essay, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’,  a question that assumes the utopian project to be a thing of the past, a historical artefact. This view forms part of a broader narrative of utopia, dominant since the late 1960s, which attributes its disappearance to the decline of modernist narratives of collective progress and improvement. So, where did these utopian visions go? Were they banished to the convenient ‘no place’ of the word’s Greek origins? Was the unfashionable and deterministic idea of progress responsible for their fall from grace? And what, if anything, stood in their (no)place? One version of events is that by the 1970s, the unifying drive of utopia was no longer up to the task of reconciling the competing claims of minority groups in a world with increasingly global perspectives.  As the utopian project waned, the concept of collective memory began to emerge in academic discourse, with all its evocative, recuperative and inclusive potential. Offering a means of coming to terms with the events of the past in order to move forward, memory seemed like an antidote to the perceived authoritarian strain in historical narratives. The past, then, having achieved a healthy distance from the present, was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance.  This temporal manoeuvre is well documented, whereby the past, through a discourse of social remembering, is shaped and interpreted according to the present situation.  However, there is something in the latest incarnation which, under the banner of memory, speaks of a particular anxiety about the future. The renewed impetus to remember, memorialise and pass on a legacy, particularly in the sphere of culture, is underpinned by the fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia.   Consequently, stories, sites and monuments of the past were never so popular, as much for what they represent as for what they are. But the question of what they represent now is critical; do they memorialise the glories of the past or hold the promise of the future? Is there something faintly utopian about the new and oft cited memory boom?

I want to explore this possibility further and to argue for a theory of utopia that goes beyond its status as an artefact of the modernist era. So rather than asking, as Skhlar does, ‘why are there no utopias today?’, I will not foreclose the question of utopia because it seems to me to be intimately linked to the contemporary concern with memory, borne out of a desire for the future. There is, of course, a well-established precedent for locating the utopian impulse within the realms of memory, for example, in the figure Walter Benjamin's angel of history,  or in the mixing of ‘memory and desire’  in T.S. Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land. Theodor Adorno gave a succinct expression of this relationship in Aesthetic Theory, writing ‘ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance’.  Here, memory appears as the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges. The anchoring function of memory is significant in an age where temporal boundaries are being increasingly challenged, effecting a sense of displacement that has been noted by several cultural theorists. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman comments that, ‘due to the ‘pendulum-like’ trajectory of historical sequences a close proximity of forward and backward or ‘utopia’ and ‘nostalgia’ pregnant with confusion is virtually inevitable’.  In this regard, utopia is peculiarly relevant to my study, where the museum, that shrine to the past, is explored in its relation to digital technologies, the current symbol of the future par excellence. Furthermore, my focus is on memory, specifically the discourse of collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. The question of digital technology is not insignificant, since it potentially re-defines the transmission of culture as the flow of information. Nor is memory a politically benign concept in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. The central proposition is that a loss of memory is what is at stake in a failure to digitise. Yet there is an irony in making claims, in the name of memory, for a technology which, arguably, changes the nature of how we experience time. As Andreas Huyssen, claims ‘the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete’.  The study of memorial forms also entails the study of the history of communication technologies; Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘what is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission’  highlights the extent to which they are inter-related. Developing this thought, Patrick Hutton adapts Walter J. Ong’s theory of media communications to broadly distinguish four modes of mnemonic representation. He links ‘orality with the reiteration of living memory; manuscript literacy with the recovery of lost wisdom; print literacy with the reconstruction of a distinct past; and media literacy with the deconstruction of the forms with which past images are composed’.  In its latest phase, the opportunities for a more reflexive engagement with memory are both obstructed and enabled by technology. While the capacity to access and interact with heritage collections are greatly increased by their presence online, the process of digitisation potentially disrupts the conventional sequence of past, present and future events, since cultural memory (that sense of the past defined through human actions or social phenomena), is not applicable to the digital archive, which has a time-based element internal to the workings of technical media.  The attendant concern is that in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates, temporal categories will be swallowed up by an all-pervasive present. 

However, rather than allowing that this situation precludes the emergence of utopian visions, I want to examine how the utopian project is manifested in the wake of temporal crisis. Contra Huyssen who concludes that ‘there can be no utopia in cyberspace, because there is no there there from which a utopia could emerge’,  I will suggest that there is a viable account of memory, technology and utopia beyond the narrative of ‘techno-utopianism’ critiqued by many contemporary commentators. 

Start the Week: Hari Kunzru and Dystopia - 17 June 2013

Lots to interest SF fans here. The episode focused on Hari Kunzru and his dystopian novella, Memory Palace, where books and the act of remembering have been banned. This work of fiction sits alongside 20 original commissions from leading graphic designers, illustrators and typographers to create a multidimensional story exhibition at the V&A. Jane Rogers discussed her apocalyptic tale, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which is running as part of R4's Dangerous Visions season. This encompasses a selection of contemporary dramas with near-future dysopian themes, as well as new dramatisations of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and Concrete Island. James Robertson spoke about his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, which explores grief, justice and the truth, and the photographer Adam Broomberg raised questions about how far images of war capture the truth.

Employment of Time (excerpt)

I recall one weekend, aged 8 or 9, going with my father to his place of work. An occurrence not necessarily out of the ordinary - I have a series of recollections of my mother refusing to leave the car, constantly complaining of the smell (my dad worked in sewage) and generally not looking very pleased at all to have her weekend imposed upon her husband’s work ethic. Anyway, she wasn’t present on this occasion. I think my brother was, but he has no part to play in this story so might as well be left out.

On this particular trip, in one of the offices my father set up some apparatus: a television, VHS player and a home video camera (VHS) mounted on a tripod. He played a video on the television, checked the sound levels, and started recording on the camera.  We left the room and occupied ourselves for the next hour or so - For me this usually involved riding down a hill on my skateboard.  I never stood up on this hill as at the time it seemed very steep.  Instead I would lie down on my chest, much like a surfer or a skeleton-bobsledder might lie, or perhaps, in later years when I’d become too large for the skateboard, in the way a Vietnam war veteran who has lost the use of his legs might sit on a skateboard - calves folded under thighs, using my hands to paddle along. I should also mention here, that this hill was excellent for sledging, and was, due to it’s location on a sewage works, a private ski-slope of sorts. After the recording was complete we returned to the office, dismantled the equipment and went home. I remember the film being Short Circuit 2.

Over the intervening years, on several occasions I’ve spoken to my dad about this trip. He says he doesn’t remember ever having made a copy of a film, and has no recollection of the specific event outlined above [Though almost any of this may be a false memory -  from the recording of the film through to my memory of my father failing to recall having done so, the skateboard (which had a ninja printed on it’s underside) and that hill were both most definitely REAL and TRUE].

The lack of corroboration from my father doesn’t really concern me, the memory seems such a strong one for me because it was a little out of the ordinary while for my dad it was just a typical weekend trip to work (there were a lot). Recently while I was thinking about this memory, it struck me that this may have had an impact on my later interests,  my own (art) practice, my writing things such as this thing you’re reading now, and even my job (I photograph and scan things in a library), but the idea of somehow condensing the seed of all future developments into this one event on a weekend from childhood is too simplistic to bear any interest or to glean any real meaning from.  What I do find interesting in this memory is the real-time-ness of the experience, the scale of the passage of time  in the undertaking of this analogue recording, the 1:1 ratio of it all, the fact that the recording of something will take the time it will take to occur - you know, like in real-life.

[A few years after this Short Circuit 2 incident, I recall my brother bringing home a copy of Predator 2. Upon further questioning it was revealed to me that this copy was created not by the screen/camera setup outlined above but in a Double-Decker video recorder (made by Amstrad?) which still took an analogue real-time duration to record, but provided the operator the opportunity to watch something else while the copying was being done. A development in technology which blew my mind at the time.]

It’s interesting to think of the 1:1 ratio now, these days, when it’s possible to digitally copy time based media very quickly indeed. It would seem that the transition from analogue to digital in these media has affected the very nature of our relationship to them.  The shift in the user experience of these digital media has precipitated the erosion of it’s relationship to our attention: that because things are so readily available, abundant, and free, they become somewhat more diffuse or disposable, providing the user the opportunity to graze or browse rather than immerse. Instantaneity means experiences can be cherry picked for immediate gratification. I’m uncomfortable with this kind of relationship as I’m sure a lot of other people are too, but I tend not to answer my phone (and subsequently don’t call people back), and I take a long time to reply to text messages or emails.  Why should this be the case when everything is so readily available? 

Perhaps it is precisely because of this abundance and availability that postponement becomes a seemingly reasonable manner in which to communicate.  I have several draft responses to emails where the intent to respond is most certainly there, but the actual response, the part that matters, isn’t. I’ve been sent emails from friends with links to youtube videos that I don’t get around to watching in their entirety, or .mp3s that I download then never listen to. Recently I received a .pdf copy of Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson. I know because I download it, it’s on my desktop, though I have never had a look inside [However, in the course of writing this, I’ve since had a brief look, so you’d best discount that last sentence]. I’d like to argue that this is a matter of technology, that if I owned an iPad or Kindle, that I’d of course read it straight away, and this would be precisely because of the availability and malleability of the media, but I’m not so sure. Likewise, if I had a comfortable room where I could listen to these mp3’s on a good stereo, of course I’d listen to them. But perhaps it’s just that I never seem to find the time, because, to do so I'd have to care enough about these ephemeral items, and because they don’t have any weight - they don’t exist through time expended (on my part) in accessing them - I don’t give them any intellectual weight.  Maybe this is a side effect of having grown up alongside these technological developments - I still have hundreds of CDs, untouched in years, at my parents house - I wonder whether I’ll ever listen to them again - DVDs that I meant to get round to watch but just never-managed-to-find-the-time. Maybe the cause of this is an internal confusion of what exists and what doesn’t, that because these are here in an instant I can get them anytime, however much I know that anytime roughly translates to never.

This text is an excerpt from the piece Employment of Time written for the exhibition of the same name curated by my friend Pernille Leggat Ramfelt. It has been (very minimally) adapted. The full text can be found here.

Function and Use

Shortly before my parents married, while my father worked in a chemical laboratory, he brought home from work a crate used to hold bottles of sulphuric acid. Over the next thirty five years he has used this crate as a stool on which to stand whilst performing jobs around the house, most notably in the hanging of wallpaper.

I have known this item throughout my life not as a crate, but as a stool. Recently upon looking at the object in its typical orientation, i.e. as it was intended to be used, I have struggled to see it as a crate - instead it will always be my fathers stool stood on it’s head, upside-down.

Early this year my mother returned from work with a  new stool. She had asked a technician friend to make a new stool based on the dimensions of my fathers 35 year old one. While retaining many of the characteristics of the old object, this item is now most definitely a stool. Constructed from MDF sheets, the new stool is noticeably much heavier, requiring two hands to lift (the earlier crate, made from thin panels of wood required only one) yet is also much more stable, a design alteration which makes it much more suitable for its function, particularly in the hanging of wallpaper.

Perversely, my father has not yet used the new stool, instead preferring his old, rickety and quite dangerous crate to do the wallpapering. I imagine he feels, as I do, an attachment to the age and character of this crate, which performs its adapted function in an inappropriate manner when compared to the new stool.