The Road to Utopia
(Introduction to a 1985 Dossier)

(One of the participants at the recent Futur*Fall conference [Sydney, Australia, 1984] asked a beautiful question: would style be possible in a Utopia? Could we answer it now by saying that style itself would be a Utopia?)

Rex Butler

... there is only one internal doctrine: that of atopia (of a drifting habitation). Atopia is superior to utopia (utopia is reactive, tactical, literary, it proceeds from meaning and governs it).

Roland Barthes

At the outset of preparing this dossier, someone asked me, incredulously, what possible interest would the readers of Tension [Australian magazine 1983-1991] have in Utopia? This meant that, in 1985, most culture-vulture ‘trendies’ have little or no investment in the future – in the very idea of (a) possible future(s). The No Future generation, and all that.

This feint regarding the future needs to be approached carefully and seriously. For indeed, surveying much of the current output of Australian magazines like Tension, On the Beach, Third Degree and Frogger or (from abroad) ZG, one might conclude that the temper of the times is ruefully dystopic – apocalyptic scenarios, tales of waste and entropy, black holes and burnouts – or, coming out of that, atopic: coolly drifting through the here-and-now, sublime indifference, la dolce vita.

Barthes spoke for the hedonist in many of us with his vision of an atopic “drifting habitation” which would suspend any vain or fruitless recourse to the realm of the “reactive, tactical, literary”. Atopia dispenses with despair and hope alike; it is a present tense discourse with neither a plus nor a minus. One might live for style, or one might find (without too much effort) a Utopia already available within the everyday … and besides, “How come you always want tomorrow,” asked David Bowie, “with its promise of something harder to do?”

The hunch and the premise of The Road to Utopia, however, is that Utopias – in a world which generally refuses to give up dreaming them – are still worth talking about, from a variety of analytical stances and speculative potentialities. The reactive, the tactical, the literary (the literary in its broadest sense: narrative cinema, TV series, etc.): why not?

Cinema sells dreams, the real disguised; fantasy, imaginary satisfaction; nostalgia, regression; sometimes it sells Utopia, always the Elsewhere.

Jean-André Fieschi

The apprehension you feel for this era is not that of the historian, the politician or the moralist, but that of the utopian who seeks to perceive the new world in precise detail, because he wants that world and he wants to be part of it.

Roland Barthes

Poe ensured that his tale could be about nothing other than the impulse to marry the creative possibilities of mythological composition with the mundanities of lived experience. In short, he chose the setting that would allow him to drift with the Utopian current that so often flows across the gulf between myth and history.

Ross Gibson

Utopia: a better world than the one we are presently in; sometimes a vision of perfection; certainly always an Elsewhere, with the burning question of how one gets there. In our cultural milieu, we are sold mass-produced Utopias that are palliatives, palpably unreal and unsatisfying; by the same token, we live, from day to day, fragments of real Utopian possibilities, glimpsing and displaying signs of otherness, difference, resistance, subversion. Utopia – or at least the thought of a Utopia, a Utopian imagination – plays right across the extremes of cultural life and cultural politics, promoting both activity and passivity, change and resignation, anarchy and coercion. We shall not presume to judge Utopias well or badly from the outset – as if there were some rigid ethical or political point to be scored on the role and usefulness of the fantasising, the dreaming which Utopia involves.

The term ‘utopia’ had a pejorative tinge in a recent question, and I think we must not put down utopias. They have a very important political place. They come before people know what the political action should be, what the analysis of the social situation is, but they are there as experimental areas of thought, whereby we can fantasise a future which will not, of course, be the future of the utopia.

Juliet Mitchell

I read questions about utopianism and Marxism as questions about the place of the unconscious in politics. The criticism I’d make of orthodox Marxism is that it doesn’t have – to quote Riddles of the Sphinx [Mulvey & Wollen, 1977] – a politics of the unconscious. And when people are attracted to utopianism, that’s usually an attempt to redress that. They’re looking at utopianism in terms of what a politics of the unconscious might be. It’s trying to introduce the dimension of desire, and so on. What I’m skeptical about is that utopianism also often introduces the dimension of wishful thinking, which isn’t the same thing as desire at all. What I would say is that desire, as a category, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic.

Peter Wollen

Here is the range of concerns that I put to the dossier contributors, from (or against) which they formulated their responses. First, a question about the history of Utopian writings, Utopian thinking: how did the ‘classic’ Utopias emerge, why, of what were they comprised? Second, Utopias today: where and how are they manifested in our culture? Third, and most broadly, the functions and effects of Utopian thought, possible evaluations of its potentialities and uses.

A fourth, tacit question emerged both in the essays, and in my mind as I compiled them; it is the serious, expanded version of the question recorded at the start of this introduction as to what possible interest Tension readers would have in a pile of articles devoted to Utopia.

Is Utopia just another one of those handy, spectacular themes which will come (has here come) to structure the contents of ‘special issues’ of current art-culture magazines? Will it simply allow – like Death, The City, The Body, Post-Politics, Desire, Borders, and so on – the reflex regurgitation of a few nice, authoritative quotes, a few sharp journalistic insights, a few predictable connections and comparisons?

Or would a discussion of Utopia be timely in another fashion – productively timely, unblocking a critical logjam or two, illuminating hitherto unseen connections, generating some new ideas, allowing one to revisit some old ideas without the fear of seeming passé?

Whether any of these positivities actually materialise on the pages of The Road To Utopia is, as they say in the classics, up to the reader to decide; but no matter how successful or unsuccessful this particular small-scale symposium has been, I would like to think that the book on Utopia, here opened, is still far from being closed.

Note: The dossier The Road to Utopia can be found (if you’re lucky) in Tension, no. 8 (September 1985), pp. 15-40. The contributors are: Philip Brophy, Michael Carter, Ross Harley, Gerard Hayes, Michael Hutak, Ingrid Periz & Szymon Bojko (1917-2014), Andrew Preston, Noel Sanders, and Mark Titmarsh. My own contribution, “Wishful Thinking”, is included in the collection Mysteries of Cinema (2018/2020).

© Adrian Martin July 1985