Envisioning Real (-ity TV) Utopias
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I suspect that Utopia on Fox (see also Alessandra Stanley, "A World, From Scratch: In 'Utopia,' on Fox, Real People Build an Unreal World", NYT 9/8/2014) is not the sort of thing that Eric Olin Wright had in mind.
Wright's "Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias" (Soundings, 2007) laid out "five guidelines for these kinds of discussions of emancipatory alternatives to the existing social order", some of which do sound a bit like issues for Reality TV producers to consider:
- Evaluate alternatives in terms of three criteria: desirability, viability, achievability
- Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability
- Clarify the problem of winners and losers in structural transformation
- Identify normative trade-offs in institutional designs and the transitional costs in their creation
- Analyze alternatives in terms of waystations and intermediary forms as well as destinations. Pay particular attention to the potential of waystations to open up virtuous cycles of transformation.
But Prof. Wright doesn't mention the possibility of enlisting a popular but off-beat cartoonist as host (in this case, Dan Piraro, creator of Bizarro and sometime LLOG commenter). In fact, the role of "host" doesn't come up in Prof. Wright's extensive discussions, nor does the associated idea of funding the community in part by offering paid "passports" to allow outsiders to observe and even influence its development.
Still, some of America's many historical Utopian communities would make a great premise for an alternative-history reality TV show. ("Alternative-Reality TV"?) I mean, Fox's Utopia seems tame, so far, compared to the Oneida Community.
Ginger Yellow said,
September 9, 2014 @ 5:29 am
Incidentally, is ""A World, From Scratch: In 'Utopia,' on Fox, Real People Build an Unreal World", the most NYT headline ever? Three commas and a colon. Only one stretch between punctuation marks of more than two words.
Ellen K. said,
September 9, 2014 @ 6:58 am
One of the five guidelines is, "Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability".
How can something be viable if it's not achievable?
[(myl) Read Wright. He writes:
All three issues — desirability, viability and achievability — are thus relevant to the understanding of alternatives to existing social structures and institutions. At this point in history I believe that the most pressing intellectual task of these three is the problem of viability. In a sense, the problem of desirability is too easy: it is too easy to elaborate the moral principles and values we want to see embodied in alternatives and to show how these values are represented by various schemes. And the problem of achievability is too hard: there are simply too many contingencies and uncertainties for us to assign meaningful probabilities to the achievability of a given viable alternative very far into the future. The problem of viability is particularly important because there is so much scepticism among people who are convinced of desirability and willing to participate in the political work to make alternatives achievable, but have lost confidence in the workability of visions beyond the existing social order.]
Of course, he fails to consider the central problem for the creators of Fox's Utopia, namely ratings.]
GH said,
September 9, 2014 @ 8:00 am
So without actually doing as you suggest and reading the article, I take it that in his terminology, "achievability" is about how to go from the current state of things to the system proposed (e.g. by proletarian revolution), while "viability" is about whether the system (e.g. communism as Marx imagined it) would actually work as envisioned.
[(myl) Apparently so. But he writes
… the theory of ruptural transformation is not a plausible theory for constructing a democratic egalitarian trancendence of capitalism. […] Revolutionary parties may be effective "organizational weapons" to topple capitalist states in certain circumstances, but they appear to be extremely ineffective means for constructing a democratic egalitarian alternative.
He doesn't consider Reality TV as a path to change, but perhaps this is just due to his limited experience of the genre.]
KevinM said,
September 9, 2014 @ 9:59 am
Could a ruptural transformation be made viable by a social truss?
J. W. Brewer said,
September 9, 2014 @ 5:35 pm
One can't just say "real utopias" is an oxymoron on the basis of utopia = "no place," because that's the Etymological Fallacy, but I wonder how many native English speakers it's still oxymoronic for because for them part of the basic definitional semantics of "utopia" is that the thing be fictional/unachievable (or, if you like, unviable*).
*Fun corpus linguistics fact: I hesitated as to whether that was the right antonym and it turns out that the google books n-gram viewer thinks that "unviable" has within my own lifetime overtaken first "inviable" and then "non-viable" to become the most common variant.
David Morris said,
September 9, 2014 @ 11:03 pm
I had not read about the Fox program. I was aware of:
"Utopia is a 2013 documentary film written, produced and presented by John Pilger and directed by Pilger and Alan Lowery. The documentary takes its title from Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland in the Northern Territory of Australia and explores the experiences of indigenous Australians and what he terms "the denigrating of their humanity"." (there was considerable debate about this here last year)
and vaguely aware of:
"Utopia is an Australian television comedy series by Working Dog Productions which premiered on ABC1 on 13 August, 2014. The eight-part series follows the working lives of a team in a newly created government organisation responsible for overseeing major infrastructure projects, from announcement to unveiling. Set inside the offices of the "Nation Building Authority" it explores that moment when bureaucracy and grand dreams collide." (there have been advertising posters for this recently, but because I rarely watch tv , I haven't paid much attention.)
There is also:
"Utopia is a British conspiracy thriller that debuted on Channel 4 on 15 January 2013."
(All quotations from Wikipedia)
Ray Dillinger said,
September 9, 2014 @ 11:58 pm
It seems bizarre to me that we're writing about utopian visions being unachievable when, after all, we live in an era when less than one person out of ten thousand dies of homicide, less than one out of fifteen hundred of starvation, and nearly all of our children survive to adulthood.
Rodger C said,
September 10, 2014 @ 6:45 am
@Ray Dillinger: You mean a corner of the world, not an era.
Ray Dillinger said,
September 10, 2014 @ 12:30 pm
Those are global averages, not national. And decade over decade, they're better than they've ever been. I meant an era.
We have in fact achieved what Thomas Moore would have considered a utopia to be.
Mark Dowson said,
September 10, 2014 @ 5:56 pm
Time to go back and read (re-read?) Karl Popper's 1945 "The Open Society and its Enemies" where he argues that attempts at disruptive or revolutionary (ruptural?) change toward a utopian vision of society inevitably contain the seeds of their own failure. In volume one he applies his analysis to Plato, in volume 2 to Marx/Hegel. His conclusion is that one should apply "Social Engineering" – an unfortunate term given its current connotations – and make incremental changes which can be evaluated for their effectiveness, and backed off if they prove to be ineffective or deleterious.
Rodger C said,
September 10, 2014 @ 7:44 pm
@Mark Dowson: I think that's just what Wright said in much less effective English.
@Ray Dillinger: I won't dispute your figures, and of course that's a Good Thing. But I'm not as surprised as you seem to be that most people don't have the sense that they live in a utopian society.
Rodger C said,
September 11, 2014 @ 1:35 pm
I meant, of course, that Wright's english was much less effective.
Ray Dillinger said,
September 11, 2014 @ 8:57 pm
I'm not particularly surprised, so much as I'm making a point. Humans being what we are, being satisfied with what we've achieved is not in our nature. And that is probably a good thing, because that is why we keep striving to do better. Still, when Moore coined the word 'utopia' he'd never have believed that what we have achieved so far would ever be possible.
This comes up frequently in the context of what may be possible in the future that isn't yet possible today. I am an optimist who believes that in the long run good people will prevail and our civilization will build wonders. Others tell me that 'due to human nature' or 'due to economics' some of the things I forecast for the future will remain unachievable pipe dreams. Thomas Moore would have claimed the same about what we have achieved today.
Rodger C said,
September 12, 2014 @ 6:50 am
I hope you're right, but I don't expect it. Anyhow, you mean Thomas More.* Thomas Moore is a Jungian writer.
*Or as the Spanish call him, Santo Tomás Moro.
Ray Dillinger said,
September 12, 2014 @ 2:26 pm
This is both beautiful and terrifying about the future; you don't have to expect it. It will happen anyway.