Supervision References

From Utopics: the Semiological Play of Textual Spaces by Louis Marin

"The book is [...] a text whose reality is nowhere [...] in the same moment utopia is the book in which the book has been deconstructed by showing the process that constructed it" (p. 65). Here's he's talking about More's Utopia, but there are interesting implications for almost any digital text or project.

In Marin's view, the work of the utopic text is to unmoor the elements of social reality from their commonplace associations, to dislocate them in preparation for a "scientific" rearticulation to which the utopian text and its author must remain blinded. For, in the beginning of theory lies the end of utopia.

After his lengthy analysis of More's book, Marin summarizes his position in a brief chapter called "Theses on Ideology and Utopia." A utopia, he writes, is "an ideological critique of ideology": "for the impacted system of ideological representation, utopia substitutes the mobility of a figure constructed on the dialogic scene by the complex discourse of tabulation." "The utopian critique is ideological" in that "the two operations that produce the utopian figure—metaphoric projection into a non-place and a non-moment and metonymic displacement by the rearticulation of the analogic continuum of reality" are not raised to a "meta-language" of critical theory (pp. 249-50).

In utopia, critical negativity remains fictive: utopia plays with, but abides within, the given world of discourse. Marin can now explain how utopia is both inside and outside the ideological system of representation—the puzzle which, we recall, started him on the project of writing the Utopiques. A utopian text is in essence self-deconstructive: it is "not without a referent, but has an absent referent."

Further refs

Wounds and Utopia (Michael Ann Holly): http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/arthistoryvisualstudies/events/wounds-and-utopia/

D. Vance Smith: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v028/28.2smith.html