Crime, Critique and Utopia

Margaret Malloch, Bill Munro

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137009807
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book explores the relevance of utopia in relation to contemporary criminology. The range of contributors explore the application of a utopian method for uncovering the potential within criminology and criminal justice, as well as the relevance of the utopian impulse for developing a challenge to the status quo in academia and beyond.

1

Utopia and Its Discontents

Margaret Malloch and Bill Munro

Before the publication of More’s De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia Libellus Vere Aureus in 1516, the concept of Utopia was represented by the Latin verb ‘Nusquama’, meaning ‘nowhere’. More combined the Greek ou (no), transliterated into the Latin u, with the Greek topos (place), to create Utopia. Thomas More’s Utopia was both an imagined ‘no-place’ and a serious critique of the social evils of sixteenth century England (Bruce, 1999). By the end of the sixteenth century the adjectival form ‘utopian’ had been born¹ and by the seventeenth century, ‘Utopia’ had made its way into other European languages (see Bacon, Cervantes and Shakespeare). Utopia was not only a poetic or imaginary place, but had come to denote general programmes and manifestos for ideal societies promoted by the authors directly (Milton, Leibniz) to be realised via political action (Manuel and Manuel, 1979). Following on from the original Utopia of Thomas More in 1516 up to the early twentieth century, a range of literary Utopias and utopian manifestos emerged, some presenting a vision of a new society; others presenting a blueprint for possibilities that could be applied in practice. While the term ‘Utopia’ came to cover a variety of meanings and interpretations that differed in content, form, political alignment and intention, one of the key characteristics of utopian politics lay in the imagining of political systems radically different from existing ones (Goodwin and Taylor, 1982; Jameson, 2005).

By the middle of the twentieth century another important function of Utopia emerged in the form of a Utopian method, a Utopian hermeneutic that functioned as an ideological critique of ideology. The question that such a method or critique poses to the utopian vision is the relation between Utopia’s imaginary expression and the historical conditions in which it was produced. For Marxists such as Marin (1984), Utopia is not ‘other’ to the ‘real’ world, but a fictional reconstruction of it, which has displaced this ‘reality’ through its imaginary representation. In this way, utopian representations can foreground the social and economic contradictions of a society in ways not available to ‘realist’ models. For Marin (1984: 161), Utopia exposes such contradictions in the form of ruptures that in turn question the ‘naturalness’ of existing conditions. Although this critique can never be total, as Utopia itself is unavoidably entangled in history, it can be read as an ideological critique of the dominant ideology; thus, ‘Utopia is at one with ideology; utopic practice is its critique’. An important text of social science that also theorises a link between Utopia and ideology critique – but this time from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge – is Mannheim’s (1936) Ideology and Utopia. Mannheim’s (1936: 51) study attempted to ‘diagnose the most important steps in the history of the ideology-utopia complex’. In this work Mannheim (1936: xxi) contrasts ideology – ‘complexes of ideas which direct activity toward the maintenance of the existing order’, with Utopia, ‘complexes of ideas which tend to generate activities towards changes of the prevailing order’, to show how both serve to fix attention upon aspects of a state of affairs that otherwise would have passed unnoticed. For Mannheim the fruitfulness of Utopia as a theoretical formulation therefore lies in its relationship to reality; the ‘attempt to escape ideological and utopian distortions is, in the last analysis, a quest for reality’ (Mannheim, 1936: 98). Utopia in this sense provides the basis for scepticism but not for action. Mannheim ended his account with a history of utopian ideas, outlining what he saw as four ‘forms’ of the utopian mentality, arranged in order of increasing historicity and determinateness: the orgiastic chiliasm of the Anabaptists, an ahistorical world view where neither past nor future exist; the liberal-humanitarian idea, closer to the temporal but still in a form unconditioned and indeterminate; the conservative idea, where the Utopia is already in the here and now, already embedded in reality (euchronia); lastly, the socialist communist Utopia (Wallerstein, 2001).

The economic and social structures of society becomes absolute reality for the socialist. It becomes the bearer of that cultural totality which the conservatives had already perceived as a unity. […] The utopia which achieves the closest relationship to the historical-social situation of this world manifests its approximation not only by locating its goal more and more within the framework of history, but by elevating and spiritualising the social and economic structure which is immediately accessible. Essentially what happens here is a peculiar assimilation of the conservative sense of determinism into the progressive utopia which strives to remake the world.

(Mannheim, 1936: 242)

An alternative view of Utopia close to Mannheim’s is the position outlined by Goodwin and Taylor (1982: 223), where unlike those forms of political theories and practices that work through intrigue and camouflage, utopianism is suited to ‘systematic study and analysis, since it attempts to free itself from many of the compromises often associated with political power and its exercise’. Utopia’s value on this occasion is not only in generating scepticism, but in making the link between political theory and practice explicit and public. Although Mannheim’s method was historical, his treatment of Utopia, while opposed to ideology, was not historically grounded in a way that could critique ideology, but like ideology, functioned as a distortion of reality. The problem at the heart of Mannheim’s book is that his opposition between ideology and Utopia could not outline an adequate criterion of truth with which to access social reality.

An alternative tradition that links a utopian method to a more broadly Marxist notion of immanent critique is that of a number of scholars associated with the Frankfurt School; namely, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. This revival of utopian thinking in the twentieth century, while critical of so-called orthodox Marxism, was also remarkably consistent with it (Jameson, 2000). As Harvey (2010) notes, for Marx, the opposite of an idealist Utopia was immanent critique and it was Marx’s negative critique of utopian socialism in Capital that gave the work itself its utopian impulse.² Utopian method for these thinkers functions as a negative and self-reflective principle that allows us to critique present social and ideological constraints. It does so by discerning the vague outline of an alternative already implicit within the present and which can simultaneously reveal the present’s dominant logic. In tracking the utopian impulse, what Bloch (2006) calls spuren (traces), he attaches considerable importance to popular literature, daydreams, fairy tales and myths as receptacles for them: emancipatory traces that project intimations of a better future life than the one lived within the social organisation of capitalist society, or, at the time of his writing, that lived under the conditions of state socialism.

The practical application of a utopian method, therefore, is in its historical grounding, where history is both a source of reflection as well as the foundation of constraint, and what appears most ‘natural’ and ‘immediate’ has been imposed by the logic of domination and human interest.

Perhaps the most important work on Utopia from within this tradition was Das Prinzip Hoffnung (translated into English as The Principle of Hope in 1986), written by Ernst Bloch in American exile between the years 1939 and 1949. Bloch’s central project in The Principle of Hope is the rehabilitation of the concept of Utopia. It is a work that attempts to move beyond present conditions to uncover the utopian traces of a transformed future. In this sense it is a work of philosophical hermeneutics; however, instead of recovering meaning from a forgotten past it attempts to uncover a utopian hope for the future from latencies and tendencies within the present. The subject matter of The Principle of Hope is a utopian longing, a notion of ‘something better’, that animates human striving for a transformed and better future. The future for Bloch constitutes only a realm of possibility (Bloch, 1988) and the fact that the future is indeterminate means that not all real possibilities will in fact be realised; however, these possible futures are seen by Bloch as part of reality. The material world is in a constant state of becoming and the future is ‘not yet’. The unrealised potentialities that are latent in the present, and the signs and foreshadowings that indicate the direction and movement of the present towards the future must be grasped and activated by what Bloch refers to as an ‘anticipatory consciousness’ (Kellner, 1997).

Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness, therefore, is close to, but very different to Marcuse’s (1969: 90) understanding of the utopian impulse. For Marcuse, the utopian impulse is an ‘instinctual’ drive for freedom that is rooted in ‘second nature’; the inclinations, aspirations and behaviour patterns that have been culturally internalised by a community. Utopia in this reading is not a regression to a past golden age, but a ‘return to an imaginary temps perdu’ in the real life of humankind. This is the anticipatory consciousness as illustrated by Benjamin in his Thesis on the Philosophy of History, when he writes: ‘As flowers turn towards the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history’ (Benjamin, 1969: 255).

The heliotropic nature of utopian consciousness situates all three authors (Bloch, Marcuse and Benjamin) within a broader context than that of hermeneutics, the goal of which is the recovery or restoration of lost or hidden meanings, in that it also involves a critical philosophical project in which they sought, not only to rehabilitate the concept of Utopia, but, particularly in relation to Bloch, to rehabilitate Utopia as a neglected category within Marxism (Levitas, 1997).

Fundamental to this rehabilitation of the concept of Utopia and to the relationship between Utopia and Marxism is the distinction that Bloch (1986) makes between abstract and concrete Utopia. For Bloch, abstract Utopia is wishful thinking, or a form of daydreaming, and as such is not accompanied by the desire to bring the dream to realisation; the world therefore remains as it is. Abstract Utopia is a form of thinking that is not only compensatory in its aim, but has also, according to Bloch, discredited the concept of Utopia:

Pure wishful thinking has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia was an abstract one. And undoubtedly the utopian function is only immaturely present in abstract utopianising, i.e. still predominantly without solid subject behind it and without relation to the Real-Possible. Consequently, it is easily led astray, without contact with the real forward tendency into what is better.

(Bloch, 1986: 145)

Concrete Utopia, on the other hand, is not compensatory but anticipatory, it reaches out towards what Bloch calls a ‘Real-Possible’ future. Bloch argues that concrete Utopia embodies the essential utopian function of both anticipating and affecting the future simultaneously. Concrete Utopia can be understood both as latency and tendency. It is present historically, as the element in human culture that Bloch seeks to recover; and it refers forward to the emergent future. Bloch (1988) distinguishes two forms of concrete Utopia: social Utopias where there are no labouring and burdened people; and natural law Utopias, in which there are no humiliated and insulted people (see Bloch, 1987). However, concrete Utopia, because it is an immanent category, does not of itself possess a specific content; it is not external to social reality. Only by concretising itself as something false, concrete Utopia always points at the same time to what should be. In this way Utopia must only be referred to in a negative way, as was demonstrated in works by Hegel and Marx. For Bloch (1988), Utopia exists essentially in the negation of that which merely is. This aspect of a contentless category is highlighted also by Adorno (Bloch, 1988: 7–8), where he writes that there is no single category by which Utopia allows itself to be named and that there are:

a whole series of very different types of utopian consciousness. That is a great deal to do with the topic because there is nothing like a single, fixable utopian content […] what is essential about the concept of utopia is that it does not consist of a certain, single selected category that changes itself and from which everything constitutes itself, for example, in that one assumes that the category of happiness alone is the key to utopia. […] Not even the category of freedom can be isolated. If it all depended on viewing the category of freedom alone as the key to utopia, then the content of idealism would really mean the same as utopia, for idealism seeks nothing else but the realisation of freedom without actually including the realisation of happiness in the process. It is thus within a context that all these categories appear and are connected.

(Bloch, 1988: 7–8)

For the notion of Utopia to function as a form of critique, it must discern the vague outline of an alternative already implicit within the present and which can simultaneously reveal the present’s dominant logic. It is the practical and historical characteristics of the utopian impulse that place it beyond a liberal scepticism towards not only a more dialectical relationship between historical change and hope, but a heretical Marxism where history is open and the past, or memory of the past, is redeemed. As Benjamin (1969: 255) writes:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not merely as the Redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Anti-Christ. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Utopia and Its Discontents
• 2. Crime, Critique and Utopian Alternatives
• 3. Utopia and Penal Constraint: The Frankfurt School and Critical Criminology
• 4. Erich Fromm: From Messianic Utopia to Critical Criminology
• 5. Crime and Punishment in Classical and Libertarian Utopias
• 6. Visualising an Abolitionist Real Utopia: Principles, Policy and Praxis
• 7. Towards a Utopian Criminology
• 8. Using the Future to Predict the Past: Prison Population Projections and the Colonisation of Penal Imagination
• 9. Techno-utopianism, Science Fiction and Penal Innovation: The Case of Electronically Monitored Control
• 10. From Penal Dystopia to the Reassertion of Social Rights
• Index