An article summarising the Heterotopia of Walt Disney World presentation that I gave in October 2009 is now published in the February edition of the Philosophy Now magazine. The article is part of a series of papers about ‘continental tales’ and the concept of narrative in Continental philosophy.

4 key citations from the short and very interesting book written by Marc Augé in1995 (contemporary philosophy and anthropology):

• “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”
• “Our towns have been turning into museums (restored, exposed and floodlit monuments, listed areas, pedestrian precincts) while at the same time bypasses, motorways, high-speed trains and one-way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger in them.”
• “Motorway travel is thus doubly remarkable: it avoids, for functional reasons, all the principal places to which it takes us; and it makes comments on them [texts planted along the way side]. Service stations add to this information, adopting an increasingly aggressive role as centres of regional culture, selling a range of local goods with a few maps and guidebooks that might be useful to anyone who is thinking of stopping.”
• “A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does and experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver [...] he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties.”

More about places on http://curatedmatter.org/welcome-to-my-place/

The video of the Philosophy and Management Pecha Kucha presentation given by Laurent Ledoux at Recyclart is now online.

Find here more details about how the pictures and Polaroids were curated.

Thanks to Jefolo, Chris Jordan, kide, QundL, Benjamin Sandri who generously let us use their photographs and to Nancy L. Stockdale, Thomas van der Vlis and Compton.m who published their Polaroids under a Creative Commons license.

The slides of the lecture I gave few weeks ago can now be consulted here. I used the example of Walt Disney World to illustrate the concepts of Utopia, Heterotopia, Postmodernisn and Consumerism. It would have taken me two hours to explain all the relations between them and the theme park. My presentation was limited to half of that time and only a subset of the slides were used for the Philosophy for All lecture. Don’t hesitate to leave your feedback. I hope that the slides are still understandable even without any comments.

Philosophical debate on Utopia and Progress

Usually, philosophical debates are organised around a specific question and maybe some philosophical texts. In this case, I wanted to organise a philosophical debate around some of the videos of the exhibition. I knew that the theme of Utopia and Progress was too vast to be completely discussed, so I considered the debate to be an introduction to the subject. The purpose of the debate was to introduce the main aspects around Utopia and Progress, show some great videos related to the theme, to inspire the audience and to get them thinking more about the subject.

Next: Children’s Art Day at the WRF

This paper introduces some of the aspects and philosophical questions related to the concepts of Progress and Utopia. It has been written as part of the Dreams of Progress video art exhibition and philosophical debate, serving as a framework for the selection of the artwork but also as an analysis of the resulting tensions.

Utopia

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Utopia is “an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions”. It is taken from the title of a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, a pagan and communist city-state in which the institutions and policies were entirely governed by reason.

The ambiguity of the word resides in its etymology, the word comes from Greek: οὐ, “not”, and τόπος, “place”, thus meaning a place that is nowhere, impossible to find in reality. Its homophone Eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ, “good” or “well”, and τόπος, “place”, is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as region of ideal happiness or good order. Thomas More could not have used the word Utopia without knowing it could be interpreted in two different ways. An Utopia can be perfect or fictional or both.

To help clarify the dissertation, I will be using the following terminology:

• Eu-topia, as explained above, derived from the Greek εὖ, “good” or “well”, and τόπος, “place”, is defined as region of ideal happiness or good order.
• Ou-topia derived from the Greek ‘ou’ for “no” and ‘-topos’ for “place,” is a fictional, unrealistic place.
• Dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος) is an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible [Oxford English Dictionary]

These definitions can be represented on a graph with two axes. [Between Dystopia and Utopia* by Constantinos A. Doxiadis*, 1966]

The first axe defines how realistic an utopia is, from ‘topos’ (meaning that the utopia is reality), to ‘ou-topia’ (meaning that the utopia cannot be real). The definition of ou-topia is unclear on the time scale used to judge whether an utopia is realistic or not. This proves to be especially problematic if technology moves at a fast pace, shifting quickly the perception of an utopia from ou-topia to topos. It remains that some imaginary societies are truly impossible whatever the state of science, because they rely on contradictions or false postulates.

The second axe is between nightmares (dystopia) and dreams (eu-topia). However, the classification cannot be objective because it must be based on a system of values. A perfect social order, for some, can be perceived as a state of perfection but, for others, it could be a type of oppression.

Graph of Utopia

I did not represent on the graph the notion of Heterotopia that Michel Foucault introduced in 1967. The concept goes way beyond the scope of this paper even though it is closely related to Utopia. I’m only going to quote the following text from Michel Foucault:

“First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.”

The graph cannot be objective simply because our idea of Utopia depends heavily on one’s values and on how much the vision is seen as realistic or not. Would a ‘good’ society prioritise the well-being of people or would it refer to the macro-level of the society? Is CCTV and ‘Big Brother’ the achievement of safety or is it the end of personal space and privacy? Debates concerning utopias often end in confrontation of values and levels of optimism.

A final aspect to consider while analyzing utopias is their purposes. They can be multiple:

• An utopia can serve as an ideal that guides the effort of a society.  It can guide for example efforts in technology.  As Constantinos A. Doxiadis describes in his book Between Dystopia and Utopia (1966),  “Technological progress cannot start without any conception of the dreamland that we want and can create. Dreams are necessary and they must precede the technological achievements” . Technology might be motivated by the ideal of knowledge, with the assumption that knowledge brings happiness. It could also be motivated by the ideal of immortality, where medicine attempts to erase what is presented as the ultimate cause of sadness. Total knowledge and immortality are two utopias driving our efforts even though they will probably never be reached.
• An utopia can also be a means to criticise a society, by considering how it can be different. The goal then is not to necessary build a realistic vision, but to bring attention to the existing social norms. The use of Utopia is particularly relevant in a oppressive context where political projects cannot be debated openly. It is also adequate when social rules are so established that the possibility of change is not even thinkable. A science-fictional vision can help by relaxing conditioned judgements and by making the assertion look less confrontational. The Garden of Eden is another example, the purpose of the biblical story was not to be realistic, but to explain what the relation between man, god and nature ought to be.
• Many utopias emerge paradoxically in times of crisis, when they are the less likely to become real. This demonstrates an important capacity of human nature, the ability to reinvent the world when no hope remains, to see beyond its immediate future and draw the lines of a seemingly unlikely destiny.

Understanding the inherent contradictions of an utopia, the aims of its author(s), its historical and social context, how it was perceived by its contemporaries, is a precious insight into a society and its values.

Progress

Progress can be about anything: science, health, happiness, wealth, effectiveness just to give few examples. This paper focuses on social progress, which is loosely defined by Wikipedia as the “changing of society toward the ideal”. The difficult part is naturally to define what is the ideal.

As an example, here is a definition of Progress derived from a specific ideal: progress is a “developmental activity in science, technology, etc., esp. with reference to the commercial opportunities created thereby or to the promotion of the material well-being of the public through the goods, techniques, or facilities created” [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/progress]. The definition is clearly based on consumerist and scientific values. One should recognize this is not the only viewpoint on what Progress should be.

Another tension exists within the notion of Progress: does it exist and in which form? The typical Western view is that Progress exists and is linear, constantly improving lives of people. A more nuanced view is that Progress happens in the long run but is made of ups, downs and diversions. The Buddhist view is that there is no progress at all, but only an eternal cycle of repetitions.

Furthermore, what happens when societies and their ideals change? Is there a ‘macro progress’ clearly building up through a succession of visions of Progress, so that society is learning from its past mistakes and defines each time a better vision, from monarchical ideals to democratic ones for example? Or is it a cycle, with notions of Progress all being equivalent, all of them predestined to collapse so that the next one can emerge?

The nature of an ideal and the possibility of Progress are both central questions to the way a society works. Throughout history, societies changed the way they operate to maximize the chance to reach their ideals: monasteries are structures invented to reach religious goals, factories are made in the perspective of achieving economical ideals, Internet is made with the hope to create a world of universal knowledge. I believe that one of the biggest threat for a society is to not elicit its position on Progress, making it impossible to organise itself convincingly, to address the challenges of its time consistently and to inspire fellowship from its members.

References

http://curatedmatter.org/2009/06/18/book-references-for-the-dreams-of-progress-philosophical-debate/

Here are the books that have been used to prepare the Dreams of Progress philosophical debate, centred around the themes of Utopia and Progress. Books and authors with an asterisk (*) can be borrowed for free at the Westminster Reference Library and other libraries of Westminster: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/libraries/.

• Utopia* by Thomas More*, 1518
• A house of memories* by Rev. Isaac Hartill*, 1900
• Brave New World* by Aldous Huxley*, 1932
• Atlas Shrugged* by Ayn Rand*, 1957
• Between Dystopia and Utopia* by Constantinos A. Doxiadis*, 1966
• Utopia on Trial – Vision and reality in planned housing* by Alice Coleman*, 1985
• Vinyl Leaves by Stephen M. Fjellman, 1992
• Excession by Ian Banks, 1996
• The Divided West by Jürgen Habermas*, 2004
• Dreams of Peace and Freedom by Jay Winter*, 2006

Also to read around the same subject:

• The Republic* by Plato*, 380 BC
• 1984* by George Orwell*, 1949
• Motopia, a study in the evolution of urban landscape* by G. A. Jellicoe*, 1961
  
• Utopia and apocalypse, a view of art in Germany 1910-1939*, 1977
• De Stijl 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia* by Hans Ludwig C. Jaffe*, 1982
• The great Russian utopia*, 1993
• Film Architecture: From “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner”* by Dietrich Neumann*, 1996
• Black mass : apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia* by John Gray*, 2007

A philosophical debate about Utopia and Progress was held at the WRF in July 2009, as part of the Dreams of Progress video art exhibition. The debate attracted around 50 people from various backgrounds, including professors from London universities, philosophical students, art curators and engineers.

In these days of economical, environmental and sometimes ideological uncertainties, the debate took a look back at our previous visions of the future, how they materialised and the way that they relate to the dreams we nourish today. The debate was punctuated by projections of videos, questioning the meaning of progress, between modernism and post-modernism, individuality and utopia, human nature as opposed to mega structures.

Philosophical debate on Utopia and Progress

The predictions for the 60s from General Motors in 1940 served as a perfect introduction to the concepts of Utopia and Progress. I asked the audience their first impressions, to describe the vision presented in the video, if it is realistic and what were the assumptions made. The video attracted a lot of interest because I think it embodies so many of the modern utopias.

In the second part of the debate, I showed the Productivity Vision for 2019 by Microsoft, the Future of Cities by the Danish Royal Academy of Architecture and the Tokyo.future by Ian Lynam. I asked people what kind of utopias and progress the videos showed, what were their assumptions and why they were made. The vision by Microsoft monopolised first the attention, it was perceived at the same time inhuman and very realistic. The Future of Cities was unexpectedly the most controversial video of the debate. Some people felt that its message was closer to their preoccupations, others thought it was not that different from the other visions and that its humanity was only superficial. The last video from Ian Lynam was sadly a little lost in the debate even if its screening got great reactions during the exhibition.

In the last part of the evening, I showed the Mardi Gras video from the artist Keith Loutit and McCool!!! from Julian Roberts and Namalee Bolle. I asked if the videos were showing utopias or dystopias. Because of the previous videos and the discussions that followed, the reference to McDonald’s was heavily debated. The Mardi Gras video was well received but came a little late in the debate to really be properly exploited.

I got many positive feedbacks from the participants of the debate. The use of the videos worked very well in engaging the audience and the contributions were challenging. It was only an introduction as two hours is just enough time to open up the conversation. Some important questions about the nature and role of contemporary utopias started to emerge by the end of the debate. One problem I didn’t anticipated though is that my selection of videos biased a little the debate towards a judgment on corporate visions, avoiding sometimes the more difficult question to define our own utopias.

You can find here the philosophical paper that I prepared for the debate, updated with some of the arguments that were raised during the evening.