Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Solidarity and Utopia

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.29.2.0127

2154-9648

Artur Blaim, Ludmiła Gruszewska‐Blaim,

Political Economy and Marxism

The present special issue of Utopian Studies is devoted to utopia and solidarity considered from philosophical, sociopolitical, cultural, and literary perspectives. It was inspired by the 18th Utopian Studies Society Conference “Solidarity and Utopia,” which took place in Gdańsk in July 2017. As the papers presented at that conference clearly demonstrated, the most immediate connotations of the word solidarity used in different contexts tend to be positive, invariably inducing utopian or messianic thinking, despite the fact that solidarity is “not morally good per se, it is good only to the extent that its inclusiveness, goal and implications for the individual are morally acceptable.”1 Unless it concerns deviant groups (e.g., criminals, terrorists, etc.), the different meanings that the concept of solidarity generates within different semantic fields—for example, moral responsibility, sentiment, legal obligations, or public policy—form a complex paradigm that we readily oppose to all kinds of antisocial modes of behavior. Nebulous and undertheorized as the concept is, its usage in the last two centuries can be easily traced in major works of social theory, politics, and theology. Paradoxically, the career of solidarity, with its aura of justice in the background and the direct precursor fraternité, or “brotherhood,” is said to have been launched when “traditional feelings of togetherness and social bonds were torn apart in the process that gave birth to modern society”2 in the early decades of the nineteenth century. An impressive range of European thinkers of the last two centuries—as different in their stances as Charles Fourier, Pierre Leroux, Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Józef Tischner, Pope John Paul II, and Richard Rorty, to mention just a few3—formulated theories attempting to contextualize and explicate the “desire for solidarity.” Originating, as different theoreticians suggest, either in human nature, conditio humana, or in the regulations/requirements of one's own semiosphere (sensu Lotman), solidarity signifies the preparedness to share sentiments, responsibility, and/or “resources with others by personal contribution to those in struggle or in need” as well as “readiness for collective action and a will to institutionalize that collective action through the establishment of rights and citizenship.”4 It could be argued that the desire for solidarity intensifies whenever excesses of totalitarian power or liberal individualization tear apart social networks—the former in the name of the state and the latter in struggle for the individual's right to freedom. Out of three historically important expressions of solidarity, the labor movement (the other two being the welfare state and international civil society) has a long and turbulent tradition that can be traced back to the early stages of industrialization. Its latest achievements include, among others, the rise of the Polish independent workers' union “Solidarność” in Gdańsk in August 1980, with its legendary leader and future president Lech Wałęsa. Viewed as a powerful and ultimately successful weapon against the communist regime, the First Solidarność—as it is nowadays called for the sake of accuracy (i.e., to distinguish it from the present union, which shares nothing but the name with the original movement)—initiated a series of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restructuring of the social, political, and economic landscape of the world (Ewa Majewska, “The Utopia of ‘Solidarity’ Between Public Sphere and Counterpublics: Institutions of the Common Revisited”). Unsurprisingly, therefore, the period of sixteen months between its birth and the introduction of martial law in Poland continues to be called the utopian “carnival of Solidarność.” However, the carnival—the anarchic moment and nonground of communitas—never serves the making of a utopian architecture, although “in no other state of social life is universal equality and solidarity felt with such intense liberating joy”; so even if the assumed future goal is the coming of a better world, the mass movement that undermines the existing sociopolitical order and sheds, if only for a brief period of time, social bonds and roles by dedifferentiation should be inscribed into a different tradition—messianic rather than utopian (Agata Bielik-Robson, “The Messiah and the Great Architect: On the Difference Between the Messianic and the Utopian”).The theme of solidarity constitutes a key motif in utopian literature and cinema. In the early classic utopias, however, solidarity may seem to be out of place for at least two reasons. First, in an ideal or even an allegedly perfect society, systemic solidarity, which involves sharing the other's hardships, tends to be redundant, if not altogether groundless, for once the best form of a commonwealth is established, that is, separated from the outer world and organized according to the ideal model, there are no hardships to be shared or wars to be fought. Second, the original act of separation that cuts utopia off from the rest of the world renders solidarity with those left outside either impossible or, at best, perfunctory, being reduced to words of sympathy, encouragement, or “good advice” offered to the occasional visitors from the dystopian outside. This somewhat ambivalent status of solidarity is particularly striking in Thomas More's Utopia. Although the originary act of transforming the peninsula of Abraxa into the island of Utopia is accompanied by a spectacle of solidarity, it is essentially a propaganda exercise, an attempt to symbolically erase the boundary between the conquerors and the conquered at the moment when an (almost) absolute separation of the future ideal order from the rest of humankind is physically established: But Utopus, who conquered the country and gave it his name (it had previously been called Abraxa), and who brought its rude, uncouth inhabitants to such a high level of culture and humanity that they now excel in that regard almost every other people, also changed its geography. After winning the victory at his first landing, he cut a channel fifteen miles wide where their land joined the continent, and caused the sea to flow around the country. He put not only the natives to work at this task, but his own soldiers too, so that the vanquished would not think the labor a disgrace.5 For the solidarity thus established, discipline and punishment continue to be the name of the game. Utopian solidarity is an institutionalized rather than a spontaneous phenomenon, forcibly imposed and made to be internalized by the citizens through a complex system of rules and commands.Until the time of the French Revolution such inward solidarity—“solidarity of communality and similarity,” though not necessarily involving the same degree of coercion—predominates in most utopian projects, both fictional and intentionally practical. In nineteenth-century utopias and dystopias, there is a manifest shift from systemic solidarity toward quantitatively more limited, interracial or cross-gender solidarity with the Other. “Solidarity with the stranger,” whose safety and well-being may turn out more important than the preservation of group solidarity, reveals the other side of utopian “perfection” (Marta Komsta, “On Utopian [Im]Perfection and Solidarity in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race”). Perceived with much greater empathy—the empathy foregrounded “to the degree that it becomes the dominant (sensu Tynyanov and Jakobson)”—the Other fosters “a new, universalistic solidarity” that complements rather than replaces same-sex solidarity (Justyna Galant, “Ruptures in Separate Spheres: Deconstruction of Cross-Gender Solidarity in George Noyes Miller's The Strike of a Sex and Annie Denton Cridge's Man's Rights”).The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have only added to the complexity of the idea of utopian solidarity, or, rather, solidarities. It is now a fake dystopian fraternity, for example, Orwellian brotherhood impairing the ability to distinguish between reality and appearance, that occupies critical attention. The Polish writers of the 1980s—a period marred by the oppressive measures of martial law—juxtaposed in their genre fiction, to a certain extent immune against communist censorship, “compulsory solidarity” (sensu Kołakowski) with voluntary solidarity. Exploring “the role solidarity plays in both the dystopian narrative of coercion and the counternarrative of resistance” (Grzegorz Maziarczyk, “Counternarratives of Solidarity in Janusz A. Zajdel's Dystopian Fiction”), they participated in a political dialogue the regime could not (or did not really want to) interrupt. More elusive representations of solidarity, rhizomatic, often “flawed and contingent” and targeting present and/or past minorities, can be observed in postmodernist fiction. Steered by utopian desire, postmodernist characters, on the one hand, “create inclusive communities that seek transfactional, transracial, transworld, and trans-species solidarity in the name of the social justice and happiness that are inherent in the promise of the American Dream” and, on the other, witness, for example, “the destruction of the utopian solidarity of alternative cultural and political communities in the 1960s and 1970s” (Zofia Kolbuszewska, “Fidelity, Betrayals, and Contingent Utopian Solidarity in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland”).In his revised version of a Howison Lecture given at the University of California at Berkeley in January 1983, Richard Rorty asserts: “The tradition in Western culture that centers on the notion of the search for Truth, a tradition that runs from the Greek philosophers through the Enlightenment, is the clearest example of the attempt to find a sense in one's existence by turning away from solidarity to objectivity. The idea of Truth as something to be pursued for its own sake, not because it will be good for oneself, or for one's real or imaginary community, is the central theme of this tradition.”6 In their quests for Truth, utopian visitors rarely adopt the impregnable position of Terry O. Nicholson, one of the three male protagonists of Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman's Herland. Visiting a utopian country of radical women, Terry does not alter his misogynist perspective, and his sense of solidarity with the male representatives of the Victorian patriarchal culture of England never wavers. However, most visitors from Europe or other non-utopian outer regions most frequently follow the model set by Raphael Hythloday and Gilman's Vandyck Jennings, who, for the potential good of their societies, partly turn away from solidarity with their own kind. In dystopia solidarity rarely wins anything except the reader's sympathy, but even there, in the bad land of appearances, various (typical or idiosyncratic) forms of solidarity may save an individual or a whole group, for example, a group of readers—Ray Bradbury's “walking books” in Fahrenheit 451—who are to preserve in their memory a scrap of (fictional) reality and the utopian ideal that may sooner or later save the world.