ELENI VELENTZA*
* Doctorante à l’École de criminologie
Centre de Recherche interdisciplinaire sur la Déviance et la Pénalité (CRID&P)
Université catholique de Louvain (Belgique)
Bourses FRESH 2014 du Fonds National pour la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS)
Centre de Recherche interdisciplinaire sur la Déviance et la Pénalité (CRID&P)
Université catholique de Louvain (Belgique)
Bourses FRESH 2014 du Fonds National pour la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS)
«Utopia as Penality’s whisperer»: Driven by 500 years of conceptual existence
Dedicated to Dan Kaminski,
my academic Eutopias' creator.
my academic Eutopias' creator.
Introduction
The magic of poetry is corollary to the magic of inexperience (Kundera, 2000). This moving idea, written by Milan Kundera in his novel Life is elsewhere, seems to perfectly fit the case of this article, which is dedicated to the famous and controversial concept of Utopia, as well as to the conditions under which Utopia could concretely operate the non-unimaginable: “whispering” Penality. Utopia saw the light of the conceptual world exactly 500 years ago, in 1516, when Thomas More, an English statesman, philosopher, scholar and Saint conceived the idea of a small faraway island where everything was ideally structured on both a political and social level. The year 1516 corresponds to the historical moment when Thomas More first published the homonymous book in Latin by University of Louvain Press, in the current state of Belgium. Etymologically deriving from the Greek prefix ou (ου), meaning no, and topos (τόπος), meaning place, the term of Utopia refers to an island which is located nowhere (Jay, 2000), or, if we may still continue to follow Kundera: Utopia refers to a land located in an unknown elsewhere.
But, let us come back, briefly, to the concept itself. The reasons why Utopia is closely linked to both notions of poetry and inexperience may not be evident at first sight, but they are both to be respectively presented, in this introductive part, through a first look at the concept’s history and nature. These two ‘links’ will simultaneously serve us as a thread -a distance line- leading us towards a first “meeting” with this sui generis concept’s content, the target always being to “demystify” Utopia in a conceptual level, in order to, later on, conclude on the prerequisites from which we should ‘depart’ in order for us to be able one day and realize/picture a world without Penality.
Utopia as Poetry. Prior to anything else, Utopia should always be contemplated as the accomplishment of a conceptual creation par excellence (poetry, deriving from the Greek: poiesis, meaning creation) and this is due to two main reasons. Thomas More created -and named- his concept ex nihilo. Firstly, he created the term itself literally ex nihilo, as he was the first to come up with Utopia as a ‘word’ and naturalize it in the lexical system of his time. This is something relatively rare to come along within the poetry of concepts (Velentza, 2015), as what is most commonly experienced is a concept’s creation to be, in a way, the product of an already existing word’s process of conceptualization; yet, this was clearly not the case with Utopia. Secondly, Utopia’s creation was not only effectuated literally ex nihilo as a ‘word’, but it was also created metaphorically ex nihilo as a ‘world’; it was a concept meant to designate an island out of the ordinary, a land that Thomas More decided to “contemplate” in a conceptual way, while experiencing and living himself in an extremely different kind of society, the one of Tudor England, which was at that time under the reign of King Henry VIII. This historical contextualization makes us conscious of the fact that Utopia was, after all, an act of a Great and highly symbolic ‘Escape’, or at least a great effort by Thomas More towards this direction. Nevertheless, problematizing Utopia, in the first part of the article, as an act of creation having taken place under concrete historical circumstances, will not mean losing sight of the eternal polarity between Poiesis and Praxis, or in other words, between vita contemplativa and vita activa (Arendt, 1998). On the contrary, in the second part of the article, it will be time to cross this polarity’s threshold and try to give an answer to the following question: “If Thomas More’s only ‘clue’ in relation to Utopias’ location is that what stands between our “mainland” (which, in our case, is a penal one) and the island of Utopia is just a narrow “ribbon” of an enigmatic sea, what would it take for us to -one day- decide to cross it for real?”
Utopia as Inexperience. Another axe of Utopia’s problematization to which this article holds on to, is that, if Utopia is, as the concept’s etymology indicates, an island located nowhere, this consequently integrates it, before anything else, into the sphere of the inexperience rather than into the one of inexistence. In other words, Utopia is a concept referring to a place primarily inaccessible to our senses, or even better, to a place in which our senses have not gained access to so far. Utopia is, in that sense, a possibility, or a reality, that we have not yet experienced. It is only under such an affirmation that one could aspire to any kind of Real Utopia (Fung, Olin Wright, 2003). Theorizing the concept of Utopia as a land of which we do not have any experience, provides us with the redemptive certainty that even if Utopias are not meant to be located, this does not mean that they are neither meant to be.
Utopia as an ‘elsewhere’ rather than a ‘nowhere’. This idea is, in a way, incidental to the one we just referred to in the previous paragraph. Perceiving and problematizing Utopia as a place located simply and solely nowhere contains the risk of losing sight of the radically and decisively critical oeuvre that Thomas More’s Utopia was at his time, as well as to the society within which it was created and the flaws of which it indirectly cauterizes.
It is maybe within the context of a possible future without Penality that Utopia acquires a whole new special meaning, a meaning that seems as promising and alluring as only few other concepts could succeed to in this context. This article claims that in order to adapt Utopia’s content to an abolitionist problematic and depart for such a penal-proof land, one should move as far away as possible from the logic of non-penal ‘alternatives’. Utopia is not an alternative and could never come to be as such, as long as alternatives are often conceived as ‘solutions’. Utopia is not and could never be a ‘solution’ to any problem whatsoever, at least if its conceiver takes off under a solution-oriented rationale; Utopia is not a solution, because solutions are always doomed to be framed in regards to the problem that has brought them on and which, thus, determinates in advance and significantly narrows down their potentiality. Utopia, on the contrary, transcends any kind of potentiality, “dances” on the edge between materialism and metaphysics and demands for itself the absolute freedom that only a concept like the Aristotelian entelechy could best describe; this means that Utopia carries within itself the intrinsic characteristic pushing the concept to cross the distance from the sphere of potentiality towards the sphere of reality. So purely imagined, and yet so meant to be real, this is this authentic utopian conceptual nature.
The first part of this article will deal exactly with the process under which Utopia has effectuated this passage, firstly, in a conceptual level, when it went past the inexistence to conquering the conceptual universe reality back in 1516; to do so, we will examine the historical conditions and context that made this passage possible. Then, secondly, the effort will involve trying to meditate on the conditions under which a second passage could be possible, this one of Utopia’s crossing the distance between vita contemlativa and vita activa, as far as a non-penal ideal is concerned and always under a critical perspective.
Utopia: a “word – world”
Utopia is, first and foremost, a concept with a political stuff. What Thomas More describes in his book is the Island’s political system stricto sensu, but also lato sensu, as far as the way of life of its inhabitants is concerned. Yet, “if it is political, then it is subsequently historical.” (Koutoufaris-Malandrinos, 2015). Thus, the objective of this first part will be to trace back the history of Utopia’s coming to light as a concept. After all, it is only after a historically holistic approach has taken place that a real critic can be made to the concept of Utopia1. First, a reference will be made to Thomas More’s life, personality and public career. Second, a closer look is to be taken on the personalities that marked, guided and formed the spiritual and public figure that he was, and notably his close friend, Erasmus, as well as his boyhood friend -and adulthood’s fateful figure- King Henry VIII of England. Then finally, before passing to the second part, the concept (and the Island!) of Utopia will be probed in more detail, so that access can be gained to the ‘story’ within the concept’s history.
A. Thomas More
“The people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe
Thomas More was born on a Saturday morning in central London during the late medieval period, with most probable birthdate the 7th of February 1478 (Ackroyd, 1998). He is born during a period that one could characterize as a highly transitional one for England, as it is marked by the country’s turning from the reign of House of Plantagenet under the one of the House of Tudor (1485-1603) and, of course, by the last dynastic wars for the throne of England, widely known as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). Although the period was indeed a transitional one, London was prosperous and a peaceful place to live (Ackroyd, 1998, 13).
“More was the scion of a wealthy and influential family.” (Ackroyd, 1998, 4). His father, a merchant who became a lawyer, had very close ties with the royal court of his time. As long as the young More is enrolled at his first school, his knowledge-journey begins. However, except from the pleasures of knowledge, he also comes to experience an environment, in which the necessity of discipline reigns. It is during this early period of his life, when he starts producing his first spiritual ‘fruit’ and engages himself in writing: “He did not write, or wish to write, ‘literature’ in any sense we now care to think of it. He wrote polemics, refutations, confutations, and dialogues in which ‘the case is put’ and challenged in true deliberative fashion” (Ackroyd, 1998, 24). Moreover, he is initiated in public debate in the platonic sense of the term. “When we come to look at his open-air dialogues, of which Utopia is the most celebrated example, we should remember that his conduct of debate was exactly that which the schoolboys of St Anthony’s (More’s first school) practiced – something to be argued outdoors and in the public domain.” (Ackroyd, 1998, 24) It is, thus, obvious, that the contact that More gained, in the early stages of his life, with the universe of rhetoric and public confrontation of ideas is extremely important for the writer of Utopia he was later to become. It is later, during his studies in Oxford University, when More excels in the study of Latin and ancient Greek. At this point, it is important to note that Utopia, as an oeuvre, is subsumed in the platonic tradition (Lacroix, 2007). This element may be considered, by some, as one of the oeuvre’s “intellectual qualities”, but, on the other hand, the harsh community that Plato’s Ideal Republic represented, with its extremely clear-cut and philosophically imposed social divisions and roles, is not –and should not be- an element to be easily overcome. At this point, what can be said is that it is maybe on Utopia’s very intellectual affinity with the platonic (and, thus, metaphysical) tradition that one should act upon in order to reinvent it and re-theorize it. Because, yes, Utopia, as it will also be presented later on, was a harsh community (Ruggiero, 2013).
Thomas More’s youth-year life path is marked by him occupying with great success some important public posts. Starting from the archbishop’s service, his public career begins with the best of omens (Guy, 1980), he climbs up the climax of public officia and he later finds himself conquering one of England’s most neuralgic state posts serving as King’s Henry VIII advisor and Lord Chancellor. It is during these years that he meets his great friend, Erasmus, but also his great enemy, who was no other than Luther whom he accused of inciting disorder among the people (Ackroyd, 1998, 65). It has a semiological importance to say that it is within the context of Thomas More’s rage against Luther that the former becomes “the first English writer to employ the Greek term ‘anarchos’ and he related the whole great change of European consciousness in the sixteenth century to the ‘hatred that they bear to all good order.’” (Ackroyd, 1998, 65). It becomes clear that the identity of Thomas More as a statesman weighs way more as far as the quality of his argumentation is concerned, when it comes to public order protection. His positivist passion about order and discipline accompany and define his personality and public way of being, element that should one bear in mind also when we come to reflect upon the beliefs and adherences of the man who conceived and wrote Utopia.
Thomas More will marry four times during his lifetime and will have six children. After having accomplished a great public career and served King Henry VIII, he is executed upon the command of his own ‘Lord’ to whom he had been a faithful servant up until the period of the Henrician Reformation began (Guy, 1980, 175). Being openly opposed to King Henry’s plans for an England clearly distanced from the Pope’s power (rupture to which an extensive reference will be made later), he is beheaded on the 6th of July 1535 within the walls of the Tower of London.
B. Thomas More and Erasmus
Nulli concedo
(I yield to nobody)
~ Erasmus
A “Jewel of the Renaissance” (Schoeck, 1986, 12); in the bibliography of the time, this is the common way in which references are made to this unique friendship between Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, humanist, catholic priest, theologist and teacher (1466-1536). Erasmus was Thomas More’s closest and most precious friend, but he was also a catalytic conscience for him (Alpha Mi, 1970), and that he was in a more general level, but also in the very specific level of Utopia’s creation which is also of our concern here. Erasmus, a cosmopolite of his time, shared with More a common intellectual path, dedicating themselves to carrying out meticulous translations of Lucian from Greek to Latin as well as to their passion for the muses. What should also not be ignored is that the story of this friendship between Thomas More and Erasmus also depicts, in a way, the story of humanism in England as this last one was at the time traversing the threshold separating Medieval from Renaissance. Their friendship is rarely questioned, yet, More’s often being “caught up in his duties to the king” (Schoeck, 1986, 13). Erasmus friendship with Lord Chancellor More went through some difficult phases, particularly during the period spanning the years 1500-1505 when no trace of correspondence between them is found (Schoeck, 1986, 12).
From the fact that this friendship was so deep and multidimensional, it can easily be derived that the personality of Erasmus had surely influenced Thomas More and his creation, yet, if one should try and find the most concrete way of all in which this amical relationship played an influential role as far as Utopia’s creation is concerned, this would undoubtedly lead down to Erasmus’ book In Praise of Follie, first written in 1509 and published in Paris in 1511. This is because, as it is widely written, if someone is willing to discover the first ‘seeds’ of Utopia, then, they will find them laying into this particular Erasmus’ oeuvre: “Erasmus’ title for his most celebrated work ‘Moriae encomium’ – ‘In Praise if Folly’ - was designed (…) to praise More, in whose house the book was written.” (Ackroyd, 1998, 6) In his book In Praise of Folly, Erasmus uses an embodied version of Folly (Nonsense) and addresses, in an allegorical way, a harsh critic to his time’s flaws, not only in the level of power but also, and maybe mostly, aiming at those who are responsible for providing education, promoting ideas and the culture of humanism. “The Praise of Folly seems to undermine every certainty to which Erasmus’s contemporaries could cling. But it also undermines itself and the morals that it seems to teach. In the words of the modern novelist and philosopher J.M. Coetzee, ‘the power of the text lies in its weakness…just as its weakness lies in its power to grow, to propagate itself, to beget Erasmians.’” (Grafton, 21)
In a more abstract level, it can be stated that when looking at More’s and Erasmus’ personalities and life paths from a distance, supposing that we never knew about the firm friendship that linked them, what would surely be remarkable and, thus, difficult to go unnoticed, is the great difference (if not distance) between the dedicated, order-passionate king’s servant, Thomas More, and the much more free-spirited and cosmopolite Erasmus who always signed his correspondence with the Latin phrase Nulli concedo, meaning I yield to nobody. So, what is also to be taken into account, except for their common passion and aptitude for knowledge and intellectual excellence in classical letters, is this remarkable and somewhat strange tension between two personalities, tension that alimented the spiritual communication between the two. But probably, it is thanks to More’s extremely duty-oriented way of being, thinking and acting, that this “fecundation” with the erasmian open-horizon intellectual gaze and humanism came out to be more than significant and decisive, also as far as Utopia’s creation is concerned.
C. Thomas More and Henry VIII
“All is lost! Monks, monks, monks!
So, now all is gone – Empire, Body and Soul.”
~ King Henry VIII of England on his deathbed
King Henry VIII (1491-1547) was one of the most notorious figures ever having occupied the throne of England. His reign2 was marked by thousands of executions and imprisonments inside the Tower of London; as for his life? It was marked by the succession of six wives, and subsequently Queens of England, two of whom decapitated under Henry’s command. It is said that Henry and Thomas More had been friends since their boyhood years/ childhood, all this long before Thomas More conceived Utopia and even longer before another turning point, which is no other than Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the first Queen of England ever to be executed. It is under the reign of King Henry that More excels in his public career and under the very same reign that/when he finds himself imprisoned in the Tower of London, some years later. But, what has Utopia to do with the period of reign of a harsh and bloodthirsty king? The answer is the following one: it is ″thisʺ England of the 16th century’s 2nd decade that forms the society and the political system in reaction to which Utopia was born. After all, the critical approach in which this article positions itself considers as its prerequisite a consciousness of the critical oeuvre that Utopia was given the extremely harsh historical context out of which it emerged.
In 1522, and while he is still married to his first spouse, Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII meets the woman who is later to be his second wife, Anne Boleyn (1500-1536). Henry’s fascination and lust for Boleyn will soon make him search for a way to end his marriage with Catherine and make Anne his wife and Queen of England. However; since England had always been under the power of the Catholic Church and the Pope, a divorce was forbidden during those times. Thus, Henry will start seeking other ways in order for this divorce to be possible even if this would mean that England would have to cut any ties with Catholicism. A series of events set into action from this point and on would guide England to the shift from Catholicism to Anglicanism, Henry to the Head of the Anglican Church and Thomas More – opposed all the way through to King Henry’s plans – prior to his own decapitation in 1535.
D. Utopia
“If is so, my dear Raphael, I beg and beseech you,
give us a description of the island. (…)
And you must think we wish to know
everything of which we are still ignorant.”
~ Utopia, end of Book I.
It is under the pressure and strong will of Erasmus that Thomas More’s Utopia first edition manages to ‘see the light’ under Louvain’s University Press in 1516, written in Latin. (Schoeck, 1986).
Which was the book’s structure? Utopia is a relatively small oeuvre and it is divided in two Books. In the first one, Thomas More presents us with the conditions under which he met, in the city of Antwerp, the person who had traveled to Utopia and from the narration of whom he came to know about the island; this person is Raphael Hythlodaeus. Two more personages are also present and soon Book I becomes a ‘theater’ of a debate. This introductive part also gives More the opportunity to strongly cauterize (mostly through Raphael) what serving a king means as well as the/and he also refers to the issue of wars. However, the second Book is entirely dedicated to the description of this ideal island of Utopia, its citizens, its laws, its customs, its way of life.
How was life on the island of Utopia? Utopia was, according to More, an ideal state, inhabited by the perfect citizens. On the island there were fifty-four identical city- states (More, 1964, 61). With their unquestionable superiority in culture and humanity (More, 1964, 60), Utopians lived peacefully in a world of physical as well as organizational perfect harmony. “No city has any desire to extent its territory, for they consider themselves the tenants rather than the masters of what they hold.” (More, 1964, 61) Thus, within such a level of excellence, Utopians demand nothing more, as they are totally pleased with their world. Life in the cities is more community-oriented, whereas in the country life is more individualized. Utopia is ruled by a representative political system, meaning that different groups of families elect their own representatives. The four governors of the island hold power for life, unless a suspicion of tyranny arises (More, 1964, 67). Utopians are dressed identically and have a strictly predetermined everyday-life schedule. Most slaves are ‘imported’ to Utopia after wars and most of them are persons condemned for crimes in their countries of origin. Utopians’ high level of education obviates the existence of laws, which are very few in Utopia.
“The hope for far better things, sustained by the view (so typically Renaissance) that man may shape the mold himself in any chosen form, is embodied in an apocalyptic vision of the best earthly state possible – Utopia.” (Surtz, 1964, 8) However, this empowerment of the individuality can generate various criticism as to whether it is to be considered as one of the positive traits of Utopia or as being the ‘seed’ that legitimates what was later to be called anti-humanism. Although Utopia is indeed structured as a social collectivity, it also extremely over evaluates individuality.
What is Utopia’s Philosophy? If attention is given to certain key-passages of Utopia, but also to the oeuvre as a whole, one could easily see that it is based on a kind of what could be called a ‘don’t-look-back posture’ and that even a same kind of philosophy transcends it. There is this following phrase from Utopia’s first book that indicates eloquently this exact element: “What he (Raphael Hythlodaeus) said he saw in each place would be a long tale to unfold and is not the purpose of this work. (…) Scyllas and greedy Caleanos and folk-devouring Laestrygones and similar frightful monsters are common enough, but well and wisely trained citizens are not everywhere to be found.” (More, 1964, 15) This phrase expresses the positive way in which More’s Utopia is conceived; the interest concerns wholly Utopia as such, its existence, its structure, its philosophy and not a possible presentation of Utopia seen and examined in comparison with other countries’ possible flaws or problematic systems.
The proto-Utopias. As it has already been mentioned, the utopian pattern historical existence can be traced back in the platonic tradition. In this same platonic line, also lies an equally interesting example and more specifically, Islands of the Sun, written by Iambulus, a Greek merchant and voyager of the Hellenistic time (2nd century B.C.). Iambulus’ polynesian country, was constituted by seven islands. These purely fictional islands were inhabited by blissful identical beings living under a peaceful but extremely strict and precise regime of life as well as “a highly ritualistic regularity of time’s perception” (Fragakis, 2010, 24) and are recorded as some of the proto-Utopias in history. Everything was transparent and public, as different groups of inhabitants periodically occupied all kinds of public posts. The people worshiped the Sun that shone eternally upon their Islands, the Sun that saw everything and from the light of which nothing could escape or hide, the Sun that had in a way the role of an absolute eye casting its ever-lasting impartial and luminous sovereignty upon them. And then, sixteen centuries later – and almost a century after More – Tommasso Campanella creates his own City of the Sun inspired by Iambulus’ proto-Utopia. In Campanella’s city everyone and everything is continuously under surveillance, groups of women assuring surveillance during day time and men during night time.
Two comments should be made at this point concerning the problem analysis of the utopian nature: first, that, as it is easily observable, all kind of Utopias should belong to an ‘out of the ordinary world’, and be located in a pure, unreachable and unattainable nowhere, and, second, that the common utopian ‘remedy’ means total exposure of people’s lives and functions to the public eye, an exposure, though/however, that will inevitably come to be a very cruel one if ever applied in real life.
Penality’s “whispering”: History, Immanence and Utopia
After having traced back the very historical beginning and context of Utopia as a concept, it is time to try and denote the actual, real, concrete conditions that should be fulfilled in advance in order to l?. In order to do so, we will try and see though, but also beyond, Utopia as a euphemism meant to conceal a harsh alternative. The emphasis of our problematization will be, thus, a deliberately ambivalent one that will critically confront Utopia to its original conceptual meaning and will also –at the same time- try to distinguish which elements from this initial meaning are able to function as cornerstones for real (rather than realistic) Utopias distant to the field of Penality. In brief, we intend to turn the “trap” of conceptual anachronism into a real means for Utopia to be realistically contemplated as Penality’s “whisperer”.
According to Stanley Cohen, the aspiration of the critical approach is neither descriptive, nor prescriptive (Cohen, 1985). Thus, after this great phrase to which this article totally adheres, this may be the right moment to stress that the real aspiration of the second part of the article is not a prescriptive, but) an emancipative one.
A. The conscience of conceptual anachronism
The first step towards the adoption of a real non-penal Utopia passes from the conscience of Utopia’s use, from our side, under the circumstance of conceptual anachronism. On an everyday common-sense level, Utopia is often thought as being a homonym of Eutopia, which it is certainly not. Giving in to Utopia’s euphemism “trap” is a common conceptual mistake, deriving, in reality, from a non-critical and almost blind adherence to what Utopia once meant, if not from ignorance. Of course, Thomas More’s motivation and aspiration was, indeed, to create a ‘better world’ but this aspiration does, by no means, ensure or guarantee the outcome’s quality. Thus, in the world of academia /academic world, it is no surprise to see the adjective ‘utopian’ accompanying and describing constructions such as the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham (Lyon, 1994) reminding us once more, the close affinity between utopian philosophy and a society of surveillance.
So what could make the difference would be to contemplate and consider Utopia always bearing in mind the historical conjuncture under which it was created. This will help Critical Criminology effectuate its critical duty towards the concept of Utopia but, at the same time, to make the next step – beyond the critic of the concept and towards reality – feasible. Apart from its evident importance, this historical contextualization is also crucial, so that Critical Criminology can get away with/get over an everlasting intrinsic problem: the paradox of criticizing Utopia as being harsh and simultaneously asking for utopian non-penal horizons. And this is not at all, as one would think, an auto-justifying process but an honest and historically-conscious posture, a declaration about Critical Criminology’s conceptual belonging, a different way to answer in regards to: Whose side are we on? (Becker, 1967).
And if Raphael Hythlodaeus narrates to Thomas More that the island of Utopia is demarked from the mainland by a narrow ‘ribbon’ of sea, historical consciousness is the first prerequisite towards this ‘enigmatic’ sea’ crossing.
B. Disavowal of Utopia’s platonic “instinct”.
According to Karl Popper: “The belief in a political Utopia, is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world (…) is one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.” (1994, 28).This particular phrase presents a double interpretative interest. Firstly, and not abusing the liberty that is traditionally given to every academic commentator, it seems that its meaning could be equally applicable to the case of a non-penal Utopia, of an elsewhere out of the actual traditional penal state response to crime of which elsewhere, however, we don’t have the slightest experience, an element that is terrifying enough. Who could guarantee us, after all, the existence of its “better” quality? And, secondly, the hunt of Utopia derives from a human ‘instinct’, with all the risky and doubtful concerns englobed by this term. However, if we cling to Karl Popper’s idea and limit ourselves to the context of Penality, to decode and to make ourselves conscious of this instinct’s very “nature” in order to overcome it (firstly in a conceptual, and then in a real level), this would be the first great step towards – not a better world – but a better edition of the conceptual compass, a ‘better Utopia’, which is one of the sine qua non conditions in order for us to be led towards a better world without Penality.
As it has been numerous times mentioned up to this point, Utopia retains a close ‘tie’ with the idealistic world of metaphysics. It is in this very philosophical “belonging” that Utopia owes its absolute incomparable ‘perfection’ and ‘purity’, or to put it in a more accurate way, what Thomas More considers and describes as ‘perfection’ and ‘purity’ within it. It is also in this “belonging” where the nature of the dangerous ‘instinct’ lies, whose presence Karl Popper rightly stresses.
But what does this “belonging’s” abandoning mean? The answer is, first of all, that this would constitute, on a general/generic level, an act of substantial political emancipation, and secondly, it would also mean what the Real Utopias project have called: Deepening Democracy (Fung, Olin Wright, 2003) that would allow us to go towards a post-Penality era. In addition to this, an eventual renunciation of Utopia’s “platonic instinct” means immanence instead of transcendence, metaphysics and inhuman expectations that, till yesterday, where naturalized as a humanistic tradition.
Conclusion
Utopia was created in the middle of the Age of Discovery (15th-17th century B.C.) and has represented a great and controversial moment of an inquiring intellectual meditation. Whoever ‘leans’ towards this concept cannot but be moved as - through its very existence and within each of his allegoric phrases – one can still sense the historical ‘vibrations’ of More’s time, ‘vibrations’ of one of the darkest historical periods of England, as well as a Europe standing in the turning point of late Medieval time and Renaissance. And, what is certain is that one should let himself be moved and “feel” the history behind the concept’s story in order to be able and take one step further.
What is more, entering the adventure that this article represented in an intellectual level, one comes to realize from the very beginning that dealing with the concept of Utopia does not solely mean confronting being confronted with History but also confronting oneself with such a multidimensional personality that its creator, Thomas More, was.
The approach pertained to possible responses out of the field of Penality, but it was deemed necessary that it passes through the most sincere and total focus on this suis generis as well as misunderstood concept’s content. After all, this article’s methodological conviction was that Penality’s “whispering” inevitably passes from “seeing into” the ‘world’ that the word Utopia carries within. As for the journey?
“The channels are known only to natives, and so it does not easily happen that any foreigner enters the bay except with a Utopian pilot.” (More, 1964, 60)
But then, as always, another question inevitably and sybilically emerges:
When the moment will be right,
would we be ready – and wise enough –
to not simply let ourselves in the hands of one (or more) immanent Utopia’s pilot(s) ?
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SCHOECK R. J., “Telling More from Erasmus: An Essai in Renaissance Humanism”, Moreana, 1986, Vol. 23, pp. 11-19.
VELENTZA E., Electronic Monitoring of Offenders and the ‘Poetry of Concepts’. Between the unattainable and the unobtainable, Oral presentation in the Research Seminar: ‘Surveillance, Control: (De)mystifying concepts’, Interdisciplinary Research Center for the Study of Deviance & Penality, Université catholique de Louvain, November 2015.
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BECKER H., “Whose side are we on?”, Social Problems, 1967, Vol. 14, N°3, pp. 239-247.
COHEN S., Visions of Social Control, Crime, Punishment and Classification, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985.
DEALY G., Plato and the Republic, 1997. URL: http://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/
ERASME, The Praise of Folly (Edited by P.S. Allen), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1913.
FRAGAKIS H., “The ‘Islands of the Sun’: an Unusual Temporal Disgression”, Temporalités [Revue de sciences socials et humaines en ligne], 2010, Vol.12. URL : http://temporalites.revues.org/1316
FUNG A., OLIN WRIGHT E., The Real Utopias Project: Deepening Democracy. Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, London, Verso, 2003.
GRAFTON A., “A Prelude to The Praise of Folly”, in ERASMUS, The Praise of Folly, Princeton, Princeton University Press,
URL: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10476.pdf
GUY J. A., The Public Career of Sir Thomas More, Brighton, The Harvester Press, 1980.
JAY M., “The Trouble with Nowhere”, London Review of Books, 2000, Vol.22, N°11, pp.23-24.
KOUTOUFARIS-MALANDRINOS I., How can theory meet reality, when reality has already met theory?, Oral presentation in the Research Seminar: ‘Surveillance, Control: (De)mystifying concepts’, Interdisciplinary Research Center for the Study of Deviance & Penality, Université catholique de Louvain, November 2015.
KUNDERA M., Life is elsewhere, New York, Harper Perennial, 2000.
LACROIX J.-Y., L’Utopia de Thomas More et la tradition platonicienne, Paris, Vrin, 2007.
LYON D., The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society; Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994
MORE T., Utopia (edited by Edward Surtz), New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1964.
POPPER K., In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years, London, Routledge, 1994.
PREVOST A., Thomas More et la crise de la pensée européenne, Lille, Mame, 1969.
RUGGIERO V., “Crime and Punishment in Classical and Libertarian Utopias”, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 2013, Vol. 52, N°4, pp. 414-432.
SCHOECK R. J., “Telling More from Erasmus: An Essai in Renaissance Humanism”, Moreana, 1986, Vol. 23, pp. 11-19.
VELENTZA E., Electronic Monitoring of Offenders and the ‘Poetry of Concepts’. Between the unattainable and the unobtainable, Oral presentation in the Research Seminar: ‘Surveillance, Control: (De)mystifying concepts’, Interdisciplinary Research Center for the Study of Deviance & Penality, Université catholique de Louvain, November 2015.
NOTES
