it always goes back to ambitopia
20 Jul 2020what I’m covering bellow
- utopia as a concept, its paradoxes
- difference between speculative fiction and utopia
- angst on dystopia, capitalist realism
- the role of the artist and ambitopia
When we look up what is the signification of the word utopia, we realize it means at once the “perfect place” and the “no place”. And when we look at, for say, H.G Wells or Thomas More utopians writings, we indeed understand that the world they show are completely fictional. This “perfect place”/”no-place” paradox is already one of interesting thoughts, but contemporary writings had brought another one. The textbook example is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, where the reader is invited to explore their own dream-city only to discover that this dreamy vision can only be achieved through the suffering of one slave-child who will never be able to feel love or joy in their life. And with this story line a new paradox for the reader occurred : they need to choose for themselves what is utopia and what is dystopia, while acknowledging that it might not be “mutually exclusive”. And this thought experiment can easily leave the fictional framework and be applied to the world we live in.
But the utopia genre is not only define by its contradictions. It also need to showcase a society, which isn’t perfect but somewhat seeks perfection, but, in all cases, is better than the reader’s current society. And, according to Wikipedia, it is one sub-genre among many of the umbrella-term of speculative fiction, which can be define as “a broad category of fiction […] with certain elements that do not exist in the real world, often in the context of supernatural, futuristic or other imaginative themes” whilst utopia specifically explores “social and political structures”. Well, debatable.
If you google “2019 speculative fiction”, you can find plenty of books to read. There is also great podcasts on the matter like SF in Translation. But if you look up “2019 utopian novels”, you’ll find hardly any. Change utopian for dystopian. Bingo, plenty again.
The thing is first, I abhor dystopia, and, second, I dislike the term speculative fiction, since it sounds utterly scientific and cold.
I mean, I can recognize that some dystopias can create some interesting things literature-wise, but that is mostly it. I have already mentioned in an earlier text the concept of capitalist realism who poses this idea that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And when I first discovered this concept, I was like, yeah, and dystopias are very great incarnations of this theory. But then I fell upon this podcast episode of the Revolutionary Left Radio and realized that dystopias weren’t neutral.
I already want to state that I’m not trying to claim that all dystopian writers are full of bad intentions (anyway, writers are mirrors). And after all, contemporary interpretation of dystopias are “that they are warning signs” before all, not an invitation to make the world a worst place. Nonetheless, there is something very insidious with them. Since we are at this point of history where part of the bigger narrative is to say that we have reached a cul-de-sac and that only the capitalist system can work even though it’s not optimal, dystopias somewhat encourage this perpetuation of the status quo as they suggest that the alternatives can only be worst.
I mean, it is true that the climate will get worse in the years to come. But truly, not everything has to get worse. And allow me to make a quick detour on the environmental subject, I can understand the popularity of “doomer lit”, this new hot genre which explores a future where the protagonists are at the mercy of climate changes because we failed taking actions on the matter. Like we indeed need to accept the grief relative to the climate (and the loss of fauna and flora) as we knew it in order to accept its reality, and be able to be proactive again on the matter.
Nonetheless, even if, in one hand, we truly cannot control of the biosphere, in the other hand, we are in control of how we organize human society and therefore I refuse doom literature in this area. As a writer myself, I understand how easy it is to fall in the dystopia trap (my imaginary is full of it), but if I fall in it, I will do my possible to turn it into an ambitopia.
It is not the first time I cheer for the ambitopia neologism. For those hearing the term for the first time, an ambitopian story would be one where we follow the making of an utopia. “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”, they say. The revolutionary craving might not be for everybody yet, therefore I think that, in the present moment, the artist also needs to create hope-food, and to help the normalization of the actual process of “i-get-my-hands-dirty-trying-to-build-something-different” (in opposition of simply rethinking life). Solarpunk is namely a very good example of what I would like to see more of in the world.
But in and of itself, utopias are great and it’s a shame there is not much utopian literature in the mainstream, and I really think we should reclaim this genre in parallel of the ambitopia-making.
But maybe something from the utopia subreddit I was unaware of will emerge and blow my mind in a near future, who knows. In the meantime I will continue my course on utopian and dystopian literature (the guidebook of it is on the Internet Archive) and enjoy the fact that I haven’t read all the utopian materials available on Earth.
And just realized that I’m officially repeating myself since 2018, does that make me an expert on the matter?