Or, Can We Salvage the Future?
'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 mid-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 (see, e.g. Huyssen, Olick et al) 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 (see Lowenthal and p. 7, Intro, Collective Memory Reader), was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance, a concern for future generations. This temporal manoeuvre is well documented (see e.g. Halbwachs, Mannheim, Terdiman), 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 fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia. Hence, 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 of the utopian impulse in 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 liminal 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. This relationship has been articulated in numerous ways; as Walter Benjamin's angel of history, memory is the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges, or the hinge between fiction and reality, or as T.S. Eliot famously wrote in the opening of The Waste Land, the mixing of 'memory and desire'. The anchoring function of memory is more 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 writes 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' (p. 321). Others, including Andreas Huyssen, have gone further and argued that 'the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete' (p. 9). However, utopia, as distinguished from other forms of futurity, is re-fashioned from the material of the present (see Jameson, trace analogy, pp. xv-xvi), which indicates that the issue is less about whether the collapse of temporal categories precludes the emergence of utopian visions and more about 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' (p. 101), I will argue that there is a viable account of technology and utopia beyond the narrative of 'techno-utopianism' critiqued by many contemporary commentators. If, as proposed by Fredric Jameson, the utopian project essentially arises from a failure to imagine the future, then this insight can be taken as a point of departure for considering how a theory of utopia might be conceived in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates.
Utopia seems peculiarly relevant to the nature of my study, where the museum (or cultural heritage institution), 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 the concept of memory, specifically cultural or collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. Both explicit and implicit discourses of memory are dominant in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. They also display the tendency, noted earlier, to emphasise the legacy of memory, and to identify chief stakeholders as the generations of the future. The tension between past and future, or the pendulum swing of utopia and nostalgia, as Bauman calls it, is evident in these discourses, and here I will refer to several examples from policy documents in attempting to better understand their relation to one another. The common strategy would be to take a broadly positive definition of utopia and argue for its affirmative potential via a complex engagement with memory (see Keightley, p. 190). But while I agree that the utopian imperative is made possible through the discourse of memory, adopting this approach would be to immobilise utopia, sidelining its shared investment in the present, and reinforcing the widespread (though I believe mistaken) practice, whereby the discourse of 'what might be' is relegated in favour of the discourse of 'what is the case'. Utopia’s important critical function, defined by James Moylan as the 'the sort of discourse which considers both what is and what is not yet achieved' (p. 10), also has renewed political currency in the 'hybrid information environment', the transitional phase between analogue and digital cultures.
It this dialectical aspect of utopia that is significant for Jameson, as well as the necessity by which it fails at the moment of its realisation. In 'Utopia and Failure', he states:
Since I intend to refer to policy examples, it is incumbent on me here to address Jameson’s distinction between utopia and a 'mere policy paper'*. The difficulty arises from the fact that all policy is future orientated. However, the policy I discuss derives its utopian elements not only from its projections about the future but from the nature of its engagement with memory. The main point of divergence for Jameson seems to be the wish to lose inherent in the utopian drive. Conversely, policy is not generally written with a view to failing but when it comes to discussions of cultural heritage, the potential solutions offered by digitisation are offset about worries relating to the enormity of the job at hand. For example, the 2003 UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage raises the concern that 'digital evolution has been too rapid and costly for governments and institutions to develop timely and informed preservation strategies. The threat to the economic, social, intellectual and cultural potential of the heritage – the building blocks of the future – has not been fully grasped' (p. 75). Similarly, the 2002 DigiCULT Report acknowledges:
The quantities being dealt with here are at best unwieldy and at worst totally overwhelming and, while the need to select is mentioned, the threat of information overload is barely concealed under the surface. It is this implicit admission that the task is too big that links back to Jameson’s diagnosis of ''failure' as a way to encourage the analysis of our own situation and in particular its crippling effects on our sense of history and of the future' ('Utopia and Failure'). In 'The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away', Ilya Kabakov expresses this problem through a fictional frame:
Losing the border between garbage and non-garbage space could be re-phrased as the fear of losing a benchmark for value in the mass of online material, and begin to form part of the basis for an assessment of our current situation. Because the volume of stored external 'memory' is now so vast, individual memory seems inadequate with its limited retentive capacities, perpetuating the belief that we will fail to remember.
In policy terms, these fears are punctuated by frequent allusions to abstract notions of memory, whereby the potential for digitisation to 'offer personalised and highly interactive cultural services that allow citizens to contribute their own story to the cultural memory' (DigiCULT, p. 55) is undercut by the more pressing drive to promote 'the memory of a nation' (p. 38). The specifically utopian flavour of these policies and projections is linked to the value attributed to memory as the promise of remembrance without loss. But, of course, to remember everything is not to exercise that process of selection characterised by memory. So the analogy of productive loss that holds for utopia is just as significant for contemporary formulations of collective memory (neccessary forgetfulness). As Jameson writes in Archaeologies of the Future:
However, with regard to memory, the (justifiable) cause of amassing digital resources that reflect 'the plurality of a society’s memory' (see DigiCULT, p. 38) makes the practice of remembering that much more complex. Maurice Halbwachs observes that 'while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as groups who remember' (p. 48), but the demand for plurality seems less achievable when entrusted to individuals or even groups of individuals in increasingly diverse societies; a programme for systematic inclusion ironically runs the risk of breaking down the categories it seeks to shore up. This is an issue to which I will return throughout my research.
* As an aside, perhaps it could be argued that there is something faintly utopian about policy predicated on the notion of a culture that is immutable and enduring. These qualities, characteristic of the dominant modes of heritage discourse (See Intangible Heritage post), bear striking resemblances to classic narratives of Utopia where, as Shklar suggests, 'Utopia, the moralist's artifact, is of necessity a changeless, harmonious whole' (p, 371).
References
European Commission, Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy: Unlocking the Value of Cultural Heritage, DigiCULT Report, Luxembourg: Official Publications of European Communities, 2002. Accessed 18 February 2013 from http://www.digicult.info/pages/report.php
Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, trans. by Lewis A. Coser, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Hviid Jacobsen, Michael and Keith Tester, 'Sociology, Nostalgia, Utopia and Mortality: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman', European Journal of Social Theory, 10:2 (2007), 305–325.
Jameson, Fredric, 'Utopia and Failure', 2000. Accessed 15 March 2013 from http://www.politicsandculture.org/2000/12/13/utopia-and-failure-by-fredric-jameson/
Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Kabakov, Ilya, 'The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away', in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive. London: Whitechapel, 2006, pp. 32-37.
Keightley, Emily, 'Engaging with Memory', in Michael Pickering (ed.), Research Methods for Cultural Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 175-192.
Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London: Methuen, 1986.
Shklar, Judith, 'The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia', Daedalus, 94:2 (Spring, 1965), 367-381.
UNESCO, Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, 2003. Accessed 18 February 2013 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001331/133171e.pdf
Further Links
http://digitalmedia.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/wiki/Presentation_Mize.pdf
'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 mid-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 (see, e.g. Huyssen, Olick et al) 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 (see Lowenthal and p. 7, Intro, Collective Memory Reader), was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance, a concern for future generations. This temporal manoeuvre is well documented (see e.g. Halbwachs, Mannheim, Terdiman), 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 fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia. Hence, 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 of the utopian impulse in 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 liminal 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. This relationship has been articulated in numerous ways; as Walter Benjamin's angel of history, memory is the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges, or the hinge between fiction and reality, or as T.S. Eliot famously wrote in the opening of The Waste Land, the mixing of 'memory and desire'. The anchoring function of memory is more 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 writes 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' (p. 321). Others, including Andreas Huyssen, have gone further and argued that 'the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete' (p. 9). However, utopia, as distinguished from other forms of futurity, is re-fashioned from the material of the present (see Jameson, trace analogy, pp. xv-xvi), which indicates that the issue is less about whether the collapse of temporal categories precludes the emergence of utopian visions and more about 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' (p. 101), I will argue that there is a viable account of technology and utopia beyond the narrative of 'techno-utopianism' critiqued by many contemporary commentators. If, as proposed by Fredric Jameson, the utopian project essentially arises from a failure to imagine the future, then this insight can be taken as a point of departure for considering how a theory of utopia might be conceived in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates.
Utopia seems peculiarly relevant to the nature of my study, where the museum (or cultural heritage institution), 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 the concept of memory, specifically cultural or collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. Both explicit and implicit discourses of memory are dominant in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. They also display the tendency, noted earlier, to emphasise the legacy of memory, and to identify chief stakeholders as the generations of the future. The tension between past and future, or the pendulum swing of utopia and nostalgia, as Bauman calls it, is evident in these discourses, and here I will refer to several examples from policy documents in attempting to better understand their relation to one another. The common strategy would be to take a broadly positive definition of utopia and argue for its affirmative potential via a complex engagement with memory (see Keightley, p. 190). But while I agree that the utopian imperative is made possible through the discourse of memory, adopting this approach would be to immobilise utopia, sidelining its shared investment in the present, and reinforcing the widespread (though I believe mistaken) practice, whereby the discourse of 'what might be' is relegated in favour of the discourse of 'what is the case'. Utopia’s important critical function, defined by James Moylan as the 'the sort of discourse which considers both what is and what is not yet achieved' (p. 10), also has renewed political currency in the 'hybrid information environment', the transitional phase between analogue and digital cultures.
It this dialectical aspect of utopia that is significant for Jameson, as well as the necessity by which it fails at the moment of its realisation. In 'Utopia and Failure', he states:
There is surely a dimension of any image of a longed-for future which must vanish when the latter, realized, becomes a present. Add to this that supplementary turn of the screw that makes a Utopian vision into something a little more or less than a mere program for the future, than a mere forecast or projection, or a policy paper: Utopians have worked hard to remove the trivializing stigma (“mere” Utopianism; a “Utopian” idea–meaning a naive and unrealizable one; and so forth), but they would be unwise to strive for complete success in this effort; a success that would mean the obliteration of any difference between Utopia and all other forms of futurity would turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory indeed, and this is another and more objective sense in which, so to speak, “Utopians want to lose” and Utopia must remain somehow unrealizable.
Since I intend to refer to policy examples, it is incumbent on me here to address Jameson’s distinction between utopia and a 'mere policy paper'*. The difficulty arises from the fact that all policy is future orientated. However, the policy I discuss derives its utopian elements not only from its projections about the future but from the nature of its engagement with memory. The main point of divergence for Jameson seems to be the wish to lose inherent in the utopian drive. Conversely, policy is not generally written with a view to failing but when it comes to discussions of cultural heritage, the potential solutions offered by digitisation are offset about worries relating to the enormity of the job at hand. For example, the 2003 UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage raises the concern that 'digital evolution has been too rapid and costly for governments and institutions to develop timely and informed preservation strategies. The threat to the economic, social, intellectual and cultural potential of the heritage – the building blocks of the future – has not been fully grasped' (p. 75). Similarly, the 2002 DigiCULT Report acknowledges:
Today the volume of material to be digitised is the most pressing digitisation issue, and related to it, the need to select. With growing scale, the nature of object digitisation changes considerably and poses problems to cultural institutions that are not yet solved, such as mass digitisation, integration of metadata at the point of digitisation, the internal transfer and storage of huge amounts of data and, of course, the exploding costs related to all these tasks (p. 16).
The quantities being dealt with here are at best unwieldy and at worst totally overwhelming and, while the need to select is mentioned, the threat of information overload is barely concealed under the surface. It is this implicit admission that the task is too big that links back to Jameson’s diagnosis of ''failure' as a way to encourage the analysis of our own situation and in particular its crippling effects on our sense of history and of the future' ('Utopia and Failure'). In 'The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away', Ilya Kabakov expresses this problem through a fictional frame:
Why does the dump and its image summon my imagination over and over again, why do I always return to it? Because I feel that man, living in our region, is simply suffocating in his own life among the garbage since there is nowhere to take it, nowhere to sweep it out – we have lost the border between garbage and non-garbage space (p. 33).
Losing the border between garbage and non-garbage space could be re-phrased as the fear of losing a benchmark for value in the mass of online material, and begin to form part of the basis for an assessment of our current situation. Because the volume of stored external 'memory' is now so vast, individual memory seems inadequate with its limited retentive capacities, perpetuating the belief that we will fail to remember.
In policy terms, these fears are punctuated by frequent allusions to abstract notions of memory, whereby the potential for digitisation to 'offer personalised and highly interactive cultural services that allow citizens to contribute their own story to the cultural memory' (DigiCULT, p. 55) is undercut by the more pressing drive to promote 'the memory of a nation' (p. 38). The specifically utopian flavour of these policies and projections is linked to the value attributed to memory as the promise of remembrance without loss. But, of course, to remember everything is not to exercise that process of selection characterised by memory. So the analogy of productive loss that holds for utopia is just as significant for contemporary formulations of collective memory (neccessary forgetfulness). As Jameson writes in Archaeologies of the Future:
Utopia is philosophically analogous to the trace, only from the other end of time. The aporia of the trace is to belong to past and present all at once, and thus to constitute a mixture of being and not-being […] Utopia, which combines the not-yet-being of the future with a textual existence in the present is no less worthy of the archaeological paradoxes we are willing to grant the trace (pp. xv-xvi).
However, with regard to memory, the (justifiable) cause of amassing digital resources that reflect 'the plurality of a society’s memory' (see DigiCULT, p. 38) makes the practice of remembering that much more complex. Maurice Halbwachs observes that 'while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as groups who remember' (p. 48), but the demand for plurality seems less achievable when entrusted to individuals or even groups of individuals in increasingly diverse societies; a programme for systematic inclusion ironically runs the risk of breaking down the categories it seeks to shore up. This is an issue to which I will return throughout my research.
* As an aside, perhaps it could be argued that there is something faintly utopian about policy predicated on the notion of a culture that is immutable and enduring. These qualities, characteristic of the dominant modes of heritage discourse (See Intangible Heritage post), bear striking resemblances to classic narratives of Utopia where, as Shklar suggests, 'Utopia, the moralist's artifact, is of necessity a changeless, harmonious whole' (p, 371).
References
European Commission, Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy: Unlocking the Value of Cultural Heritage, DigiCULT Report, Luxembourg: Official Publications of European Communities, 2002. Accessed 18 February 2013 from http://www.digicult.info/pages/report.php
Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, trans. by Lewis A. Coser, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Hviid Jacobsen, Michael and Keith Tester, 'Sociology, Nostalgia, Utopia and Mortality: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman', European Journal of Social Theory, 10:2 (2007), 305–325.
Jameson, Fredric, 'Utopia and Failure', 2000. Accessed 15 March 2013 from http://www.politicsandculture.org/2000/12/13/utopia-and-failure-by-fredric-jameson/
Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
Kabakov, Ilya, 'The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away', in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive. London: Whitechapel, 2006, pp. 32-37.
Keightley, Emily, 'Engaging with Memory', in Michael Pickering (ed.), Research Methods for Cultural Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 175-192.
Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London: Methuen, 1986.
Shklar, Judith, 'The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia', Daedalus, 94:2 (Spring, 1965), 367-381.
UNESCO, Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, 2003. Accessed 18 February 2013 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001331/133171e.pdf
Further Links
http://digitalmedia.arts.ufl.edu/~jack/wiki/Presentation_Mize.pdf
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