The abolition of money

Who can fail to see that fraud, theft, pillaging, disputes, riots, strife, rebellion, murder, treason, poisoning, all those crimes that repeated punishment fails to deter, would die out with the abolition of money. And at the very moment when money vanished, so too would fear, anxiety, grief, stress and wakeful nights; even poverty itself, which seems to be just the lack of money, would instantly vanish if money was completely suppressed.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 120-121

Wherever things are measured in money

To be entirely frank it seems to me that wherever you have private property and all things are measured in money it's all but impossible for a community to be just or prosperous, unless you consider that justice can function where the best things belong to the worst people, or that there can be happiness where everything is divided up among very few – and even those few derive little benefit while the remainder are thoroughly wretched.

Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin Classics, 2012) pp. 51-52

Forcing us to think the break itself

For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the Utopian form, which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.

 Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future (Verso, 2005) pp. 231-232

An unsuspected variety of new collective combinations

Meanwhile, thus renewed, the Utopian impulse wanders the gamut from dual relationships of all kinds, relationships to things fully as much as to other people, all the way to an unsuspected variety of new collective combinations. And insofar as our own society has trained us to believe that true disalienation or authenticity only exists in the private or individual realm, it may well be this revelation of collective solidarity which is the freshest one and the most startlingly and overtly Utopian: in Utopia, the ruse of representation whereby the Utopian impulse colonizes purely private fantasy spaces is by definition undone and socialized by their very realization.

Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future (Verso, 2005) p. 230

Reality isn't frozen

'Obviously, compared to the concept, reality is always wrong; as soon as a concept is embodied, it becomes deformed. But the superiority of the Soviet Union over all other possible socialisms is that it exists.'

Henri looked questioningly at Dubreuilh. 'If what exists is always right, there's nothing left to do but fold your arms and sit back.'

'Not at all. Reality isn't frozen,' Dubreuilh said. 'It has possibilities, a future. But to act on it – and even to think about it – you've got to get inside it and stop playing around with little dreams.'

'You know, I have very few dreams,' Henri said.

'When someone says, "Things are rotten," or, as I was saying last year, "Everything is evil," it can mean only that he's dreaming secretly of some absolute good'. He looked Henri in the eyes. 'We don't always realise it, but it takes a hell of a lot of arrogance to place your dreams above everything else. When you're modest, you begin to understand that, on the one hand, there's reality, and on the other, nothing. And I know of no worse error than preferring emptiness to fullness,' he added.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005) p. 705

Horizons of expectations

We will not reclaim a future qualitatively different form the present by reinvesting in the idea of horizon. At its best, contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectations.

Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All (Verso, 2013) p. 211

True hope is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is

Hope is to be reinvented. Would this mean that what this hope aims at is to be obtained through invention, a beautiful utopian future, or through the splendor of the imaginary that certain romantics are said to have had as their horizon? Not at all. The hope that passes by way of the ideal – the lofty heavens of the idea, the beauty of names, the abstract salvation of the concept – is a weak hope. Hope is true hope insofar as it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, what is. What is is presence. But hope is only hope. There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope. The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirms it: I hope little when what I hope for is almost at hand. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope. But at the same time we must not hope, as in a dream, for a chimerical fiction. It is against this that the new hope appoints itself. Hoping not for the probable, which cannot be the measure of what there is to be hoped for, and hoping not for the fiction of the unreal, true hope – the unhoped for of all hope – is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) pp. 40-41

Idyllens paradox

Idyll måste vara sinnets tillfredsställelse – utan att strävan dock upphör.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) p.84

Idyllens rörelseproblem

Det finns en definitiv gräns för den mängd kulturstoff som en människa kan tillägna sig på ett aktivt, funktionellt sätt. [...] Och vad skulle behövas utöver detta? Vilken rörelse i vilken riktning skulle vara att föredra framför en fullständig rörelsefrihet inom den hittillsvarande mänskliga traditionen?
Den är tillräcklig.
Men vart tar människan vägen? Idyllens rörelseproblem innebär en paradox som kan formuleras så här. Meningsfull rörelse innebär att man är på väg någonstans. Idyllen, så som Schiller definierar den, avser att gestalta ett fulländningstillstånd. Vart skulle en människa i detta tillstånd bege sig? [...] Ett tillstånd utan meningsfull rörelse blir ett slags död. Det kan inte uppfattas som fulländat.

Sven Lindqvist, Myten om Wu Tao-tzu (Månpocket, 2013) pp. 85-86

If I could believe in utopia, it would be a utopia of free movement, a perpetual assertion of self-determined existence in space and time. But I cannot believe in utopia, so I believe in movement attained through and limited by struggle, tension, anxiety and the assertion of my personal power against the power of the earth, against gravity and death.

I cannot believe in utopia, because utopia insists on an absolute consensus among people, and such a consensus cancels the individual's power to assert his and her presence in the world. Consensus is an ally of gravity. It is in fact a form of gravity that slowly and insidiously disables individuals and makes them impotent before the relentless claims of gravity and death. I declare war on consensus.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Aerial Paris' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 64

Once it's lost, innocence can't be found again. Paradise is a place with many exits, but no entrance. There's no way back from knowledge. When you fall from grace, that's it.

I wonder, to find it again, whether we shouldn't do just the opposite of what we've done. If we shouldn't take another bite out of the apple...

Paul Gégauff/Barbet Schroeder, La Vallée, 1972

The emergence of death is then at that point the signal that it has been possible to take the point of view of the species upon human existence. Utopia necessaraily takes the point of view of the species upon human history, thus emptying it of much that we consider not merely historical but irreplaceably significant in human life. For the urgent specificity of historical events is at one with their uniqueness and their contingency: the irrevocable moment when this special possibility had to be grasped or forever lost. History is the most intense experience of this unique fusion of time and the event, temporality and action; history is choice, freedom, and failure all at once, inevitable failure, but not death. Utopia is set at a height form which those changes are no longer visible: even if the Utopia in question is one of absolute change, change is nonetheless viewed from that well-nigh glacial and inhuman standpoint as absolute repetition, as a sameness of change as far as the eye can reach. A state of society that does not need history or historical struggle lies beyond much that is precious to us in individual as well as collective existence; its thought obliges us to confront the most terrifying dimension of our humanity, at least for the individualism of modern, bourgeois people, and that is our species being, our insertion in the great chain of the generations, which we know as death. Utopia is inseparable from death in that its serenity gazes calmly and implacably away from the accidents of individual existence and the inevitability of its giving way: in this sense it might even be said that Utopia solves the problem of death, by inventing a new way of looking at individual death, as a matter of limited concern, beyond all stoicism.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 122-123

I have already suggested that the thinking of totality itself – the urgent feeling of the presence all around us of some overarching that we can at least name – has the palpable benefit of forcing us to conceive of at least the possibility of other alternate systems, something we can now identify as our old friend Utopian thinking. Of the antinomies, perhaps we can conclude a bit more, namely that their ceaseless alternation between Identity and Difference is to be attributed to a blocked mechanism, whereby in our episteme these categories fail to develop, fail to transform themselves by way of their own interaction, as they have seemed able to do in other moments of the past (and not only in the Hegelian dialectic). If so, that blockage can only have something to do with the absence of any sense of an immediate future and of imaginable change: for us time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without overlapping or transitional stages.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 70-71

For the ideals of Utopian living involve the imagination in a contradictory project, since they all presumably aim at illustrating and exercizing that much-abused concept of freedom that, virtually by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified: if you know already what your longed-for exercise in a not-yet-existent freedom looks like, then the suspicion arises that it may not really express freedom after all but only repetition; while the fear of projection, of sullying an open future with our own deformed and repressed social habits in the present, is a perpetual threat to the indulgence of fantasies of the future collectivity.

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 56-57