A Dream of Communal Society for Parts Without Parts: On Thomas More's Utopia
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2016.45..295
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
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This essay attempts a contrapuntal reading of Thomas More's Utopia. Contrapunctual reading, proposed by Edward Said. attempts to make a text speak across temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries to a topic of present. I examine two opposite readings of Utopia around 2011 by both pro- and anti- Occupy Wall Street positions. On the one hand, the opponents of Occupy find its limits as a utopian social movement echoing in the fictional character of Hythrodaeus and the alternative society verbally sketched by him in Book Two of Utopia. On the other, Occupy's advocates read More's text as embodying its radial possibility. However, each shares the tendency to denounce Book Two, praising Book One in which Hythrodaeus vehemently criticizes England; they read Hythrodaeus not as an utopian idealist but as a social critic. The Occupy, as a result, is seen here as having an ambivalent relationship to utopianism. I reinterpret the radical possibilities of Book Two criticized by both pro- and anti-Occupy invocations of Utopia. Book Two provides a utopian space in which the existing social contradictions are cancelled, revealing the limits of the three partial utopias proposed at the end of Book One. Following Louis Marin's argument, I argue, the "utopic" space does not lie in the so-called ideal society described in the text but in the inconsistencies between the text's description(discourse) and topography(map). In Book Two the existence of a king is described, yet his space is not found in the topography of utopia; likewise market is described as existing at the center of a city, yet its space is not found either. These inconsistencies create a neutral space in which the ideological contradictions of the text are cancelled, and the space opens up the possibility of communal society beyond modern sovereign power and capitalism I argue this utopian dream needs to be summoned once again in our time as a compelling alternative to the corporate, capitalist order.
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