Understanding Utopia and Authenticity 172

“Utopia” was coined by Thomas More (2011), whose sixteenth-century text

Utopia (a novelistic prototype) explored what must have seemed in many ways to be a “good” model for English society. More fused two theretofore distinct concepts in his novel term: outopia (good place) and eutopia (no place) became a pun denoting “a good place which does not exist” (Sargent, 1994, p. 5). Might utopia one day exist? Is it

62 _{My understanding of utopia is greatly informed by Zygmunt Bauman (1976), Ernst Bloch (1986), and}

Ruth Levitas (1990), and my understanding of authenticity by Charles Taylor (1992), all who we will explore in more detail below.

perfect, or just better than the society within which the reader currently toils? These questions are ultimately left unanswered by many utopias. Utopias merely offer a virtual mirror through which present and future possibilities can be imaginatively worked out (Bloch, 1986).

However, utopia does come to mean “static, perfect place” over the course of the twentieth century (Bauman, 1976, p. 10). This pejorative re-orientation of utopia was effected from both the Left and the Right. Indeed, Engels (1978) even played a part here, lambasting Fourier, Owen, and other utopians for their undialectical attempts to escape the reach of industrial capitalism. And yet, utopia is both “good” and not (yet) existent; it is not necessarily perfect, nor is it necessarily static. In his attempt to salvage utopia from the dustbin of history, Zygmunt Bauman (1976) outlines four unique functions of the concept. It is an image of a future and better world that is:

(1) felt as still unfulfilled and requiring an additional effort to be brought about; (2) perceived as desirable, as a world not so much bound to come as one which should come;

(3) critical of the existing society; in fact a system of ideas remains utopian and thus able to boost human activity only in so far as it is perceived as representing a system essentially different from, if not antithetical to, the existing one; (4) involving a measure of hazard; for an image of the future to possess the qualities of utopia, it must be ascertained that it will not come to pass unless fostered by a deliberate collective action. (p. 17)

In Bauman’s description, we see both the functionality of utopia and its location within the structure of the present; utopia is constituted by the collaboration of desire, will, creativity, and collective action. Similarly, Ruth Levitas (1990) defines utopia (and here

we begin to see the importance of authenticity within recent articulations of utopia) simply as “the expression of the desire for a better way of being” (p. 8). Utopian

dreaming is about filling in the lacks of the present’s version of the future with the potent virtualities of the “Now” (Bloch, 1986).

Both Bauman and Levitas perhaps owe much to Ernst Bloch, one of the first to point out that utopia is not just a fanciful vision of an impossible place, but a lack paradoxically constituted by the plenitude of the present as it explodes towards a future:

Thinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way that what already exists is not kept under or skated over. Not in its deprivation, let alone in moving out of it. Not in the causes of deprivation, let alone in the first signs of the change which is ripening within it. That is why real venturing beyond never goes into the mere vacuum of an In-Front-of-Us, merely visualizing abstractions. Instead, it grasps the New as something that is mediated in what exists and is in motion, although to be revealed the New demands the most extreme effort of will. (Bloch, 1986, p. 4) Utopia for Bloch is not a fanciful realm of impossibility. To be a utopian is just to be a thinking, desiring being. Further, as Bloch highlights, to fully embrace the potentialities of the utopian, we need to attempt authenticity, as “the New demands the most extreme effort of will.” Bauman, Levitas, and Bloch all return to More’s originally ambiguous term. Utopia is not impossible or necessarily static; it is a critical and immanent way of engaging with the future insofar as it exists within the present.

Like utopia, early articulations of authenticity begin to emerge in the West in the sixteenth century. Yet, as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet, for instance—“to thine own self be true”—is not yet an example of authenticity

but of sincerity; Laertes should be true to himself so that he cannot be false to anyone else (Trilling, 1971, p. 3). Authenticity, on the other hand, avoids such instrumentality; to strive for authenticity, to be or become what one is, is by definition its own end (Trilling, 1971). Authenticity proper begins to germinate in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps fully flowering in the Romanticism of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and

Friedrich Hölderlin, on through to existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Yet, as Charles Guignon (2004) has shown, though Romantic conceptions of authenticity have been pervasive and influential, the concept has had a much wider reach. Martin Heidegger and even postmodernists such as Richard Rorty work with various

permutations of authenticity, even if at the same time certain features of modernist authenticity are problematized by postmodernist assumptions (Guignon, 2004).

Like utopia, authenticity is not a single, natural, or ideal essence, according to Charles Taylor (1992). Taylor argues that the project of authenticity is best approached as a centuries-long discussion about what it means to be “fully, really” human. Authenticity is a process and a struggle, and (like utopia) authenticity involves asking critical

questions about present ways of being (Taylor, 1992). According to Taylor, we need to reconsider the rich dialectical history of the concept:

What we ought to be doing is fighting over the meaning of authenticity, and from the standpoint developed here, we ought to be trying to persuade people that self- fulfillment, so far from excluding unconditional relationships and moral demands beyond the self, actually requires these in some form. The struggle ought not to be over authenticity, for or against, but about it, defining its proper meaning. We ought to be trying to lift the culture [of authenticity] back up, closer to its motivating ideal. (1992, pp. 72-3)

Authenticity, like utopia as articulated by Bauman or Bloch, might involve any way of being. Yet it is precisely the activity of collaboratively discussing and attempting authenticity in which Taylor is primarily interested. Taylor himself is perhaps too committed to holding on to the “rational,” discrete self, but nonetheless we could translate his argument onto a more rhizomatic ontology. The “motivating ideal” of authenticity described by Taylor might push us past the need to “fulfill” individual selves as such.