How Do Utopian Visions Shape Our Reality & Future? - Highlights - S. D. CHROSTOWSKA
“I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this,” “I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.”
Duration:
20m
Broadcast on:
25 Jul 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?
S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.
S. D. CHROSTOWSKA
Utopia and the Age of Survival was really an axiological intervention, a reminder of certain values that unite the left. In the book, I focus on two things: Utopia as a myth -- not as a political myth, but as a social myth, in the sense that it goes beyond politics -- and I also communicate my preference for utopias that are not state-based. I use the term “body utopias,” because they’re really anchored in the individual rather than the collective. They arise from individual bodily needs, desires, and how the two interact. From there, they also take into account our individual differences.
Utopias really began as and are anchored in myths; of the golden age, of paradise, and, more recently, of revolution. Utopia is a speculative myth of where society is headed. I think that left-wing thought and socialism -- within which we find anarchism -- can be united around this idea. On the other hand, of course, capitalism also uses utopia, and refers back to ulterior myths to put our critical capacity to sleep. In our capitalistic culture, utopia is used to sell a vision of a better body, a better society, and a better future for the “techno-utopian” crowd. The earlier myth is Thomas More’s city of Utopia; More is the originator of modern Utopianism as we know it, this idea of a utopian island reserved for just some. With my book, I try to take back the term of utopia, and to also rehabilitate a bit this idea of myth, which has been tarnished by 20th century ideologies. I try to do this in order to find the broadest possible common ground for left-wing thinking.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We as a society have been talking about utopia for a long time, but what does it actually look like to put that into action?
CHROSTOWSKA
I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” -- the expression “effective dreaming” comes from Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. My novella, The Eyelid, is where I first put some of these ideas into images -- ideas which later I developed in Utopia and the Age of Survival. I like the definition of effective social daydreaming because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies, but I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming, because our night dreams are wish fulfillments. In The Eyelid, I explored night dreams and their utopian potential. But going back to effective social daydreaming -- utopian ideas are embodied in our actions. The 19th century French liberal Lamartine said utopias are often only premature truths. Another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real -- that’s a quote from the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. We daydream of a better world, and this could be a very vague daydream. The idea of utopianism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed, orderly, rational model of the city utopia. It’s this free floating, desirous model of the body utopia, which is unfinished and imperfect. It's always in transformation. These dreams and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, influencing our day-to-day behavior if we let them. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.
The Techno-utopian Dream of AI
There’s the existing AI and the dream of artificial general intelligence that is aligned with our values and will make our lives better. Certainly, the techno-utopian dream is that it will lead us towards utopia. It is the means of organizing human collectivities, human societies, in a way that would reconcile all the variables, all the things that we can't reconcile because we don't have enough of a fine-grained understanding of how people interact, the different motivations of their psychologies and of societies, of groups of people. Of course, that's another kind of psychology that we're talking about. So I think the dream of AI is a utopian dream that stands correcting, but it is itself being corrected by those who are the curators of that technology. Now you asked me about the changing role of artists in this landscape. I would say, first of all, that I'm for virtuosity. And this makes me think of AI and a higher level AI, it would be virtuous before it becomes super intelligence.
Surrealism as a Framework for Utopia
In recent years, I’ve turned to Surrealism. I found in it something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility, and a history with which I remain in dialogue. Most people mistake Surrealism for an aesthetic movement, but Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. I find it a very important piece of the puzzle of what attitude we should take in order to live in a more “utopianizing” fashion, as I call it in my book. We can daydream of a better society, one that includes not just us or our family, but everyone, because a utopia worthy of the name today is universal, it's all-inclusive. So surrealism is not just an aesthetics, it's also an ethics, and that ethics is utopian. It's an impulse to refashion one’s life, to create a world, and to transform the world into a desirable one. We want the imagination to be empowered. I talk about Surrealism in the book, but it has since taken on even greater importance in my day to day life. I am actively involved in the French Surrealist Movement in an effort to keep it alive, and to remind the public that it is still very much an international movement staying true to its principles. I've co-curated a major exhibition of Surrealism, reflecting on the 100 years since the Manifesto of Surrealism, so I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in Poland at the end of the Cold War, and how that shaped your visions of utopia in the modern age.
CHROSTOWSKA
I grew up in Poland in the 80s and the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. As a child and adolescent, I had a taste of both worlds; I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. I was in the US when Chernobyl happened, and the West left an indelible impression on me. I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodity culture; that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better contributed in more ways than I can even name to the education of my sensibility. There also was the freedom of expression that, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland. This was a brief period [of my life], but it was very important. And then, in 1989, we had the first parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in the Eastern Bloc. It was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the Solidarity movement and they distributed samizdat literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show me this clandestine literature. I understood the fear of surveillance, the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through, and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin, and this was as the Wall was coming down, demolished with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. I thought this was very symbolic. Witnessing these two very rapid transitions made me think that change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. Maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking, for embracing utopian thought.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
How do you reconcile visions of utopia with living in harmony with our planet, especially considering that the concept of utopia implies a man-made design or a return to an original equilibrium with a pristine nature that may no longer exist?
CHROSTOWSKA
I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine Earth. We have to do the best we can with the Earth that we have inherited for our generation and for those of our children, but we should not, therefore, say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative, because we've been robbed of this idea of pristine nature.
I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries, right? I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, right? Or paradise, an idea of nature, again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think – just to return to this idea of species extinction – I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost.
Reflections for the Next Generation
I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Devon Mullins with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Devon Mullins. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Associate Text Editor was Sofia Reecer. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier
(gentle music) - You're listening to highlights from the Creative Processes interview with writer and historian Sylvia Kristauska. This podcast is supported by the Jan Moschowski Foundation. - So I cropped and pulled in the 80s, the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. And I say this because as a child and adolescent had a taste of both worlds as it were, I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet Bloc, Eastern Europe. I was in the U.S. when Chernobyl happened, and the taste of the West that I got left an indelible impression on me in the sense that I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodities. And that commodity culture, that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better, fully left an impression on me as a young person, and contributed in more ways that I can even name to the education of my sensibility. And also it was the freedom of expression that I, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland, in school, the encouragement that I received in New Jersey. And then in 1989, of course, we had the first quasi-democratic elections, parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in Eastern Bloc. So it was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the solidarity movement, and they distributed some as that literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show this to me and this clandestine literature. So I understood the fear of surveillance and the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and when the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin. And so this was as the wall was coming down, demolished, with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. And I saw this as well, and I thought this was very symbolic. So witnessing these transitions, these very rapid two transitions made me think that the possibility of change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. And maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking. I grew up seeing a dream of change being realized, and then maybe I went on to see every sudden dream as potentially effective. And the prospect of sleeplessness and therefore of dreamlessness, and this connects to daydreaming and the inability to imagine utopia as an alternate futures, this prospect is frankly terrifyingly real. No, it's not the first to say this, of course. Many have warned us that where we're headed as a society, that we're headed straight for insomnia. The need to produce, the need to always be on standby in a global system that we are creating is, of course, connected to this. It's not just the video games that are keeping us up or Netflix or something like this. We are creating the structure that is ensuring our sleeplessness. And if we no longer are able to recuperate, we're no longer able to handle the stress. We will hallucinate sleeplessness, as AI does nowadays, hallucinate. And we'll make errors that only the machines will be able to ask. This course opens up to the dystopia of human extinction, right? When we lose control of what machines do and we won't be able to align them or values. Returning to my academic work, but also my fiction, because the two are intricately connected. So my novella, the eyelid, is where I put some of these ideas into images, these ideas that later I developed in the book, on Utopia and Age of Survival. I like to think now as of utopianism as effective social daydreaming. And I'm using an expression of effective dreaming that from Ursula Le Guin's novel, The Late of Heaven, I like this definition of effective social daydreaming, because, of course, utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies. I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming. And so far as our dreams are wishful filaments, our nightdreams, our wishful filaments. And in this novella, I explored nightdreams and their utopian potential. So back to effective social daydreaming, utopian ideas are embodied in our actions, in our criticism of existing society. And I like this quotation from a French liberal 19th century, La Martine. Utopis are often only premature truths. Or another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real. And that's another quote I'm pulling from the founder of surrealism, Andre Breton. So we dream, we daydream, of a better world. And this could be a very vague daydream. This could be a very free floating kind of reverie. And the idea of utopiaism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed model, orderly, rational model of the city utopia, but this free floating desirous model of the body utopia, which isn't finished, which is always imperfect. It's always in transformation, it's not complete. So these dreams that we have and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, our imagination is always involved in creating reality. And the opposition between the two reality and fantasy or the imaginary is not a stark one. They're porous. I've just mentioned surrealism. In recent years, I've turned to surrealism. I found in surrealism something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility and a history with which I remain in dialogue. So what is surreal that? Well, most people mistake it for an aesthetic movement that's long over and all we could do is celebrate it this year, it's a hundred year anniversary of the manifesto of surrealism. So we'll celebrate it as a finished movement. And in fact, it still continues. And this living movement is what I'm a part of. Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. So on the unconscious or semi-conscious, a reverie is that kind of semi-conscious state of daydreaming. And so I find in surrealism a very important piece of the puzzle of how to, what attitude we should take in order to live in a more utopianizing fashion, as I call in my book, not utopian because we're not creating utopias. I don't go as far as to say that we are creating utopias around us, but I do say that we are living in a utopianizing way. If we daydream of a better, that includes not just us or our family, but includes everyone because utopia worthy of the name today is universal. It's all inclusive and somewhere for the happy few or the rich or for the poor, for that matter. It's not restricted. My interest in surrealism is, I think, absolutely necessary. I talk about surrealism in the book, but since the book came out, it has taken on a greater importance in my day-to-day life. I am actively involved in the French surrealist movement. In an effort to keep it alive, to remind the public that it is still an international movement, as international data has been in the past, and that it's staying true principles to its beginnings. It's not just aesthetics. It's also ethics. And ethics is utopian. It's ethos is utopian. It's an impulse to create the world, to refashion one's life and to transform the world into a desirable one. We don't argue for violence. We want the imagination to be our... The imagination is not a gift. It's something we need to conquer. It's something that not even conquer, conquer, it doesn't have the right tone to it. But it's something that we need to cultivate. The beauty of capitalism is that it awakens our senses. It creates things that we didn't know we needed, that we didn't know we desired. And there is a confusion between what we need and what we desire. Much of this abundance is unnecessary abundance. I say unnecessary because I'm thinking of the limited resources that the Earth provides. I think the imagination helps us to find abundance, richness in ourselves and our response to what are limited resources. And after this long period of capitalist exuberance, which still continues, you know, set up to just walk down the street and you'll see that the quantities of installs along the street, the quantities of sneakers that all look more or less the same and they're cheaply produced. It's all plastic. And of course, the desire is solicited there, is awakened in the passerby to have another sneaker, another product that we don't need, but that has a certain allure of adding quantitatively, of course, but the allure is that it will qualitatively transform our life. But all that does, of course, add another pair of shoes. You mentioned Le Guin. I think she brings some really interesting ideas that bringing ethics and utopia and fantasy all together and this beautiful soup, her idea of own loss are still relevant to society and to conversations around utopia, that idea of a society that is perfect in all ways except for the child that they keep in a basement. It is a story that I've thought a lot about. The beauty of it is that it presents us with a society that is a mirror of an image of our own. Things haven't changed very much since she wrote it in the 70s, but that don't recognize as our own society. Our society is built on many children in the basements that are sort of scapegoats of, that are the sacrifices of our luxuries. The message in that story is absolutely relevant to today, more and more so, I'd say. The walking away, the very ambiguous ending because the ones who walk away from Omalas, they're walking into the dark, they are either engaged in a refusal or in self-erasure and a kind of social death. They go away from a society they can't bear, but it's not clear that they are able to create a counter-society that will be an improvement on the very wonderful society of Omalas, except for that one flaw. And of course, there is a Christian dimension to the story that the child is a sacrificial victim of the society, but it is a story that reflects capitalist society, American capitalist society engaged in wars and of course, spreading violence to far-flung parts of the world that citizens of Omalas, as the citizens of America, pretend not to notice. So those walk away are those who are dissidents, who protest wars, and of course, we have these protests today that are very much about walking away from a society that does not assure its own principles, its own values are defended. What's going on in my university is symptomatic, what's going on across universities in North America and elsewhere. And that is the dismantling of not just unions, but of liberal education and therefore an education for citizenship. Humanities and social sciences are affected in my university for which the humanities and social sciences have made its reputation. And so this gutting of liberal studies, and in particular, my field, humanities will set us back considerably, I think. And on the one hand, university administrators are responding to shifting priorities by students, who are themselves, of course, dictating what courses are on the books offered this year. On the back, on the other hand, you have generative AI that is interfering with and eroding the core of educational benefits of these programs, my program, because it relieves students of the tasks of research of critical analysis and writing. So what I see, I think, sort of, and I'm not a prophet, but that I see, is a return to the one-on-one private tutor model, that, of course, was a model in the 18th century for the aristocracy, then the bourgeoisie. And this will, of course, be a model available to the rich. And they will receive an education that is more complete. Whereas, and even private institutions will move away from what isn't profitable. Private institutions that are still collective and industrial educational institutions. They will be reducing programs in response to declining enrollments. So what we're seeing is a kind of chain reaction, because there is increasing economic demand and insecurity, pre-corization of labor. This means that young people are making different and more strategic choices. And they will be less and less motivated to pursue disinterestly, non-instrumentally, programs of study alike, my own. But it's precisely in the utopian spaces where thought-free inquiry are still possible and encouraged that students can learn to put things to step back from the chaos that is society today and to get some distance on the anxiety that they feel, to see what's wrong with life and to think of how it might be fixed. And without these spaces of learning where we can exercise the social imagination and me as well as a teacher, I exercise my social imagination and speaking to young people, we all risk being overwhelmed by the amounting dysfunction, social dysfunction. And yeah, it may be that teachers will be replaced by machines, for now there's just speculation, but for the foreseeable future, the quality of higher education will continue to decline. That's my sense. I don't really have an answer of how we can keep journalism alive. I think there is a responsibility by governments to keep journalism alive. And I said, it's not as easy as that because people prefer to get their views from TikTok or in short form. And so much of this journalism goes unread. And deep fakes populate feeds. And people prefer visual information. So they will, of course, be duped. Again, it's a free for all. It's not that we're post truth because we still value truth. We still value objectivity, even though that's been put into question by Gonzo Journal. I don't give as much credit to this idea that we're living in a post truth moment. We're still living in a knowledge economy. And we're still epistemophilic. We love knowledge. There is an ignorance economy. And as I said, knowledge requires time. And we don't have the time. So despite our insatiability, our thirst for knowledge as a commodity, we only have the time and the means for partial or even false knowledge. And so we are drawn to theories. Explain that package things for us and to meet explanations where they're conspiracy theories, where we get a kind of a handle on what's going on. Rather than wading through all this mass, still great mass of journalism that is produced, we prefer to scroll videos and images and where these kinds of conspiracy theories proliferate. So I'm not very optimistic. Without government, we can keep journalism alive because it just doesn't sell anymore. There are kinds of solutions that papers have been coming up with in order to keep that journalism alive. But let's face it. Number of journalists is declining by the day. I'm currently co-curating a major exhibition of surrealism, the 100 years of surrealism. So I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement. And another connected movement to this is anarchism, which rather than projecting utopias, prefers to talk about prefiguration in the here and now of the world as you'd like it to look. So it's a very experimental approach, this prefigurative approach. It's a very experiential approach to utopia. It's modeling, but in your own individual way, creating communities as well, of course, of shared values, communities of shared ideals of how to be, how to be Henry with one another, how to live together in a way that is sustainable, that is not anarchistic in the bad sense, anarchy, as Eliziric Thus said, anarchy is the highest expression of order. And so that is the ideal for anarchism. And that order is not the rationalistic top-down model of the city utopias of the followers of Thomas Moore and Thomas Moore himself, the founder of utopias, misunderstood because his utopia, it's only part two that's read. And people think utopia is a blueprint, but of course it was much more complicated for him. It was a play, it was a game for him, this utopia that he imagined. And I think imagining utopia, so imagining the myth of utopia, projecting utopias and allowing them to be destroyed simply. And this is the kind of iconoclastic utopianism that I developed in the book. This is the vitality of utopianism today. The pluralism, the plurality of utopias and the combating of any dogmatic utopias that may arise. Resisting the kind of the blueprint model, resisting the recipe for the future, the winning version, resisting that impulse and just constantly proliferating images, glimpses, as I say, of a better society. I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine earths. We have to do the best we can with the earth that we have inherited, our generation. And those of our children. But we should not therefore say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative. Because we've been robbed of this idea of the pristine nature. I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term. But the idea that humans transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, is something put into perspective for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand-in-hand with nostalgia in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries. I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, or paradise, an idea of nature. Again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These imaginaries, these are nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate the utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I don't think also to return to this idea of species extinction, the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost. I'd like them not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free. And I do want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains in the depths of the ocean, elusive to the nets of the internet. In its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, right, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia, of course, Wikipedia is a particular expression of this. So in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present for us than for any other generation in our lives because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. But this proximity actually affects the past's pastness. Yeah, it's kind of bygone this. With Walter Benjamin called the aura, this appearance of distance. That it had happened long ago, that it's not just something that is collapsed into the present. Yeah, and that distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings or archival documents, photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. Even if a lot of it is, it's not lossless, that reproduction, not to mention that the carbon footprint of the digital footprint, this is the downside of the accessibility of all knowledge. So yes, it's curiosity. This is what I would like to pass on. It's curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital, at the virtual. It's really tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but it's not the case. We hope you've enjoyed listening to these highlights to listen to the latest episodes or learn more about participating in exhibitions or interviews. Click on subscribe. Thank you for listening. (gentle music)
