FAILURES OF UTOPIAS

Yesterday I had a brief but interesting conversation with a fellow artist. After touring her very good installation and hearing all the trouble she had to go through to make it happen, our talk drifted to a conversation she had had with her father who had described to her the period of the sixties in Lebanon: According to him, people where much more enthusiastic. The possibilities of collective actions were far greater. It was easy to gather people around events, to get them to believe in something and do something about it.

My brief response was that this was a period of utopian thinking, where many people believed religiously in communism, liberalism or nationalism. I also pointed out that this utopian thinking has caused hundreds of millions of deaths – including victims of the Lebanese war whose fate was decided by belief in failed utopias.

Back home, I remembered a book I have recently read by John Gray. It is called Black Mass, Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. John Gray demonstrates that fascism, communism and liberalism are derived from Christian apocalyptic expectations. Just like their religious predecessor, these 20th century movements view history as a narrative with a given direction and predictable sequence of events. Thus they see struggles of the present as part of “a partially realized drama” where the forces of good – whether they call themselves Socialists, Nazis or Liberals – are locked in mortal struggle against forces of evil. Each view this struggle as an apocalyptic war that will end in the triumph of good – themselves - followed by a period of eternal harmony. In neo-liberalism, harmony can take the form of Fukuyama’s “end of history”, in Marxism it is universal communism and the dictatorship of the people, in Fascism the thousand year rule of the Aryan semi-gods.

According to Gray such narratives give meaning to the otherwise meaningless “meanderings” of history and provide believers with the faith that they are part of universal and dramatic unfolding of predictable and partially realized events. Gray describes the devastating effects such millennial views have had on the 20th century, resulting in the death of hundreds of millions. He also shows how these myths legitimize violence as the price for an eschatological future of eternal bliss and organic harmony. Whether it is Communist accepting and defending the Gulags or Neo-Liberals defending the American war on Iraq, both see violence as a necessary prelude to an end of history and the birth of a universal golden age. Thus populations are unwillingly and violently thrust into narratives that are not their own:

“Those who are crushed or broken in order to create a higher humanity, who are killed or mutilated in acts of spectacular terror or ravaged in wars for universal freedom may have ideas about their place in the world altogether different from those they are assigned in the dramas that are being enacted. Universal narratives create meaning for those who live by them, they also destroy it in the lives of others.”

So what solution does Gray propose? According to him: “The need for narrative can be a burden and if we want to be rid of it we should seek the company of mystics, poets and pleasure lovers rather than utopian dreamers. Though they look to the future these dreamers nearly always recall an idealized period of innocence – Marx’s primitive communism, or the lost world of bourgeois virtue cherished by neo-conservatives. As the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, “Clearly, apocalyptic thinking is nostalgia at its very worst.” The effect of seeking refuge in an imaginary future harmony is to bind us to the past.”

A sub- group of these failed utopias is in the contemporary art world. That the art world is in a state of failed utopia is visible by its fragmentation and its inability to produce coherent collective narratives – a fragmentation seen in the works themselves; in their critical tendency and in the current of self-reflexivity found in them; a self-reflexivity concerned with the relationship between work, context and viewer, where the subject is disbelief either explored or induced by the artworks themselves. Whereas Modernism was able to project utopias and make people believe in them, some currents of Contemporary Art - although enthusiastically willing - seem totally unable to do so. This death of utopia is not a negative, that the Utopias of Modernity have failed catastrophically can be seen in Modernist architecture and the devestation it has wrought on the Lebanese landscape.

But abandonning utopias is never easy. Their loss can be both bewildering and dispiriting, with artists seeing themselves as working in a vacuum of meaning. This feeling of crisis I have often experienced. But beyond this internal crisis, if successfully navigated, the disappearance of utopia implies the value of the present in the sense that the artwork is not in the service of some idealized past or future but is meant to signify and give value to an eternal present - the only eternity there is. This is the Epicureanism that the author describes when he talks of “pleasure seekers and mystics.” Mysticism, when it does not turn to hatred of life and punishment of the body is the intensification of pleasure seeking, the spirituality of the body.

My brothers the Epicureans.