Fotograf Zone – Utopia

Is it not characteristic of all forms of utopia and utopian thinking that they produce a vision of a theatrical dystopic hell articulated in infinite deferral?

Ideal spaces, environments, places, countries, where there are no geological fluctuations or social ruptures. The harmony of life’s rhythm grows through magical cities in contact with the exterior under predefined conditions.

And perhaps somewhere inside, in the invisible folds of the perfect structures, there is an imperceptibly deepening crack that has the potential to disrupt the firmly fixed order, break the harmony, dislocate the monadologically arranged world from its limbs.

It is no coincidence that the phantasmatic location of utopias is the island. Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between two types of islands: on the one hand, there are those that can be called continental or “accidental”, “derived” because they “are separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them.”¹ For utopian thinking, however, much more interesting are the oceanic islands, which are “originary, essential islands. ... [Some] emerge from underwater eruptions, bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths. Some rise slowly; some disappear and then return, leaving us no time to annex them.”² And as Deleuze adds, “dreaming” about oceanic islands means “dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.”³

Every (oceanic/utopian) island is initially “desert,” “deserted”; it is situated outside the zone of the human shaping of space. And when we arrive at it, it gives itself to us as unprecedented, isolated, full of the potential to be transformed—as if we were becoming the semi-divine creators of a non-existent order, as if we could build an environment that would accurately reflect our mind.

But encounters with desert islands certainly do not happen under ideal conditions and in ideal situations. We have been wandering the ocean for weeks and months; we are exhausted; we don’t know where the waves and currents are taking us; the maps have become useless—and suddenly the undiscovered coast of the oceanic island appears before us, its mountains and vegetation. Or we are shipwrecked on the island; we wake up on the beach; our mouth is dry; wounds from cuts burn our body and our head is delirious. After all sorts of attempts to draw attention to ourselves, efforts to identify our geographical location, our mind begins to stagger in the dark.

Our mind infuses itself into the landscape. We begin to build and create the perfect order; we bind the forces of chaos into the territory. Robinson Crusoe hoards frenetically, accumulates supplies, creates a monadological universe in which everything has its place—even his faithful fellow Friday, whom (almost for the whole narrative) Robinson does not understand as a human being, has a fixed range of activities and duties. Michel Tournier shows that Robinson’s compulsive behavior is carried by the melancholic-affective-traumatic experience of a situation of isolation that always leads to total destruction. And he offers a way out: letting the rays of the Sun fall upon us, killing the ibex, becoming one with the island. Free yourself from the strata of subjectivity and become pure energy. Utopia has been achieved, but at the cost of ceasing to be human entities.

Or we have an oceanic utopian island at our fingertips; its secrets are right before us, but we are still prevented from discovering them. In Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, Father Caspar Wanderdrossel finds himself right at the source of the mystery, right by the island, but he never sets foot on it because he can’t swim. His utopian phantasm is embodied in the most material contours, but he is condemned only to the visual penetration of the object of desire: “The Specula Maltensis could not be reached, because Father Wanderdrossel, like Roberto, was unable to swim. The longboat was still over there in the inlet, but it was as if it did not exist. [...] Father Caspar did not seem excessively troubled by this long isolation; indeed, he rejoiced, as he could once again enjoy the use of his cabin, the deck, and some instruments of study and observation.”⁴In Freudian terms, it is the reality principle—and of course Father Caspar dies in an attempt to overcome the distance between his ship and the island.

The interwar domestic avant-garde, headed by Karel Teige (but also as represented by Kroha), finds itself in a similar situation. The First World War halfopened the door to the realization of utopian images of the new organization of society. The left-wing avant-garde sought inspiration in the Soviet Union, an area that saw the incredibly rapid transformation of social, economic, geopolitical structures, rejecting all forms of capitalism and emphasizing the collective. The projects of “koldomy,” the poetistic magic city, and even that of the body’s own biomechanics, aimed to build a new world full of life, joy and happiness on the ruins of the old world. A body like a magnet, in which electromagnetic life rhythms spread new affects and experiences of the world; the elimination of ornamentalism in the interior; the purity of the body; sport, circus, boxing matches, ballet in which the dancers are not clothed with anything other than their own skin: these are expressions of utopian thinking, thinking that sought to create an oceanic island rationally constructed and poetically interwoven with a burst of sensory impressions, within which and on whose surface the new harmonious human wildly dances. And, as has already been said, such visions are de facto always dystopian: the new person spending time in the work process by sharing things, spending free time frolicking wildly with others and having nowhere to lay his head except for a small room with a table and small lounger —that is a terrifying vision. Fortunately, utopias are always present in the form of deferral, in the dialectics of “now” and “arriving”: “Now-here”; “No-where,” write Deleuze and Guattari. Utopias are surrounded by an “ocean,” a plane of immanence par excellence that threatens them with drowning and madness. Utopian thought organizes the hunt for the White Whale of the perfect society only to die with it in the final encounter.

Utopias are technicistic; they are a mold of the technical. As is shown by popular literature, such as H.G. Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free, technical progress will lead to the destruction of this world, so that a new world can be built on its foundations. In the book, Wells “predicted the discovery of atomic energy in 1933 and its full industrial exploitation in 1953, when the atom definitively replaces steam. However, the discovery of cheap and readily available energy [...] causes the complete collapse of civilization, rising unemployment, riots, and ultimately leads to a devastating war—and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin [...] In the second decade of the 20th century, of course, H.G. Wells still imagined that collapse and a devastating world war would eventually become the precursors to the establishment of a new order in a world free of work, in which the working man becomes a creative artist.”⁵

And let us not forget how much faith has been placed in digital and computer technology. Although in many areas of production and industry, machines have replaced human labor, or humans are becoming machine operators, we certainly do not live in a situation where the penetration of all sectors of human life by network media would reduce socio-economic differences; quite the contrary. A whole series of utopian ideas about the relationship of state-of-the-art technology and society were, after 2000, replaced by dystopic visions describing the “society of control” or claims by many authors that artificial intelligence and machines will replace human privileges on the planet, and that this replacement is another step (sic!) in evolutionary development. Islands begin to be absorbed and engulfed, slowly disappearing, yet despite this, the power of utopia drags itself to the surface again and again.

The politics and micropolitics of desire, conflict, aggression. The struggle between a liquid state, non-localizable resources of power, and a sharp underground, almost terrorist trend. And a return to nature, which, superficially means a return to Earth, but more probably involves a different way of stratifying landscape. Holotropic breathing, the revival of new age communities, these are the strange twitches of a world tossing around on the vectors of the infinitesimal search for utopian delight and brutal capitalist exploitation.

The description of all forms of escape offered by Michel Houellebecq is accurate and uncompromising. Maybe we have no choice but to submit. Because we probably do not want to die yet, because we live in a world in which we know nothing will ever be solved.

Let’s avoid big actions, says Slavoj Žižek, and he is right; it is enough to show that Jordan Peterson has no power to say anything, that his guide to a happy life is the utopian ideology of the Western world. Certainly, we shouldn’t let anyone touch our mango smoothies, but we shouldn’t let them touch our cartons of blue Camels, whose smoke is, in a sense, wilder than any hallucino- gens: “I wake up about five o’clock in the morning, sometimes six [...] The first thing I do is turn on the electric coffee maker; the previous evening I filled the water container with water and the coffee filter with ground coffee (usually Malongo, I’m still quite particular where coffee is concerned). I don’t smoke a cigarette before taking my first sip, it’s an obligation that I impose upon myself, a daily success that has become my chief source of pride (here I must admit, having said this, that electric coffee makers work quickly). The relief that comes from the first puff is immediate, startlingly violent. Nicotine is a perfect drug, a simple, hard drug that brings no joy, defined entirely by a lack, and by the cessation of that lack.”⁶

It may seem that I am no great friend of utopias. Phantasms are much closer to me. Of course, utopias are always to some extent fantasy, phantasms contain a pinch of utopia. But that’s not the point. Utopias are for me associated with the collective, with arrangement, order, happiness and joy. Phantasms are traumatic (but which utopia does not find its source in trauma?), wild, hallucinatory, andunpredictable/singular.They intervene without warnin, they are always—and ubiquitous. They are always within us, in the innermost fissures and ruptures of our minds are hidden specters. As with utopias, we can be choked by phantasms, drowned in them. But perhaps it is precisely this inner terror that creates the material and immaterial conditions of acting and dealing. Perhapsitisphantasms(asubjectiveintheiressence,subjectiveintheirpower) that are the driving force of the world.

Text: Martin Charvát

Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 9.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 10.
Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before, trans. William Weaver, London: Vintage Books, 1998, p. 271.
Miroslav Petříček, Philosophy en noir,(Prague: Hermann & synové), 2018, pp. 14–15.

Martin Charvát

works as an assistant professor at the Department of Media Studies at the Metropolitan University in Prague and is the head of the Center for Media Culture Studies there. Externally, he cooperates with the Prague FAMU. He focuses on media philosophy, French poststructuralism, and the (semiotic) analysis of pop / cultural phenomena. He is the author of four monographs. The latest is about the TV show True Detective (True Detective: A World in which Nothing is Solved). His fifth monograph on the topic of technoimagination in Czech poetism is being prepared for publication by AMU Publishing House (Miraculous Crossing: Karel Teige and Vítězslav Nezval). He is also co-author of three collective monographs and co-editor of two collective monographs. He has written more than two dozen academic studies.

#36 New Utopias

We understand the phenomenon of Utopia as a problematically broad concept. For this reason we will try to anchor it primarily in the field of political economy, and to present it to the reader through the prism of the most contemporary artistic and theoretical interpretations. Today, the term utopia is often interpreted primarily as a historical term that does not bring much new, and which, in society generally, is primarily related to the past. In the case of visual culture and art, it is particularly associated with modernist architectural visions expressing ideas of the new organization of society. We want to avoid this kind of simplistic approach that buries itself in history. Of course, we cannot ignore some major projects, such as the Black Panthers political movement; Black Mountain College art education; the architecture of the Florentine radical designers, UFO, Superstudio, or 9999; or the projects of Le Corbusier or the Bauhaus school. It is always necessary, however, to offer an insight into how we relate to these ideas today and thus how they are treated in the realm of the image. Our basis for interpreting the idea of utopia is for us the term commons, or joint sharing. It allows us to play out, in this issue, the search for new utopias in contemporary society. We ask how new possibilities of cooperation, coexistence, and the sharing of resources, information, and commodities are currently reflected in the visual arts (and, in regard to history, what are they drawing on)? We are interested in the fields of community and spiritual life, in new economic networks, radical pedagogy, current visions of the possibilities of the scientific exploration of the world, and in ways of creating new forms of social relations. We would like to try to find answers to what roles and forms of utopia there are in today’s society, which is labeled with so many dystopian terms (e.g. risky or post-truth), and by means of this thematic issue we want to offer a positive survey of possible solutions to current catastrophic data, scenarios and debates. In a time of “permanent crisis,” it is precisely solutions that are so much called for, but they are only rarely presented in art and theory. From the perspective of visual communication, besides photography, we will also turn more to the new possibilities of depiction that artists work with in order to prefigure new systems of communication and relationships. That is, work with the moving image, video games, and computer animations.