Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.32.3.0681
ISSN2154-9648
Autores ResumoWhen discussing one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels, Mikhail Bakhtin ruminates on the poietic power of dialogue: in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and […] not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. […] At the level of his religious-utopian worldview Dostoyevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. […] Two voices is the minimum for life.1 Notably, Bakhtin’s commendation of dialogue as a sine qua non ontological condition communicates both necessity and hope, implying the indispensability of an encounter with an other and the promise of self-constitution it carries, whether on the subject-forming level of Levinas’s face-to-face or with relation to the cosmogenesis of an alternative order. Such a profound dialogic encounter as the nucleus of any utopia is of pivotal significance in Phillip P. Wegner’s Invoking Hope. Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (2020) where, in the Marxist strain, he explores “dialectical-materialistically comprehended hope” and offers a lesson in attentive, creative dialogism.2The book collects texts that mostly originated in response to the eventful year 2016, which marked the 500th anniversary of More’s Utopia and the centenary of Saussure’s groundbreaking Cours de linguistique generale. Notably, the celebrations of the two works that so remarkably contributed to our intellectual tradition befell in the year that saw the inauguration of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, an occurrence symptomatic of the global rise of right-wing populism. Written against this background, Wegner’s book performs many of the functions we value in a utopian text, fictional or otherwise: it is written with the attitude of purposeful alertness toward the contemporary reality, it diagnoses its dangers, suggests remedies, and emboldens the readers with messages of hope and encouragement. At the core of the book is the notion of utopia as a means of education of desire, first theorized by Miguel Abensour and axiomatized by Ruth Levitas (The Concept of Utopia), best achieved, according to Wegner, through adopting the approach of the analyst, sensu Jameson—involving the practice of deep listening and creative, even playful, engagement with a variety of material, here, specifically, theory and utopia.A truly multifaceted work, Invoking Hope is both an intellectual manifesto in defense and praise of critical reflection and willful, instrumental hope and a scholarly work that successfully demonstrates the exercise of these virtues in the form of academic analysis. Undoubtedly, when the author demonstrates the illuminative power of critical thinking and invites his readers to take up dialogue with his own interpretations his writing is truly powerful and brilliant—revealing interrelationships, overlaps, and nuances, opening up perspectives. Nonetheless, on occasion, its readers may struggle when the rich body of theoretical cross-references does not obviously contribute to but rather clouds the argumentation.The substantial and informative introductory section locates the book in the political and academic institutional contexts of the present, foregrounds its utopian-pedagogic commitment, and addresses the key concerns and analytical concepts employed. Wegner then proceeds to the theoretical consideration of part 1, “Reading Theory.”In the challenging first chapter, “Reading the Event,” Wegner introduces Badiou’s notion of the event that constitutes the core of his understanding of utopia in the book and explains the analytical tool of Greimas’s semiotic square that presupposes the constructedness of all narratives on the basis of varying sets of text-specific key concepts and their mutual relationships. Explicating the basis of his methodology, Wegner positions the Lacanian three orders on the square and, significantly, locates the Real in the Greimasian Neutral position at the base of the structure. This move reveals the affinity of the Real with Badiou’s event, since both evade symbolization (and thus incorporation into the dominant order) and remain outside the system, potentially threatening its stability. A further consideration of event as disruptive of the hegemonic structures and constitutive of a radically different status quo allows Wegner to discuss the arrival of the New Critical text-oriented idiom in the American academia as an event that initiated the era of a fundamentally new, discipline-transforming, approach to textual analysis. While acknowledging the arguments raised by the detractors of New Criticism Wegner highlights the utopian potential in the critical approach, which, in its essence, encourages attentive reading and equal, productive, free exchange that levels the text’s creator with all other readers and thus prevents a potential curtailment of dialogue by referencing authorial prerogative. The final section of the chapter offers Wegner’s analysis of Badiou’s hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic, identifying the reworking of the classical text as faithful to the event of the birth of democracy in ancient Athens and pointing to two other universalizing readings of the work: Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, and Wegner’s own semiotic mapping of the five possible political systems in Badiou’s rewriting of Republic.The starting point for the discussion in chapter 2. “Toward Non-reading Utopia” is Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read (2007) in which the French scholar argues that all reading is, in fact, nonreading (involving, among others, skimming or selective reading, accepting or opposing critical or popular opinions about the work one has or has not read) that in all cases amounts to a creative reconstruction of the text in question. With this in mind, Wegner refers to the long tradition of critical (mis)representations of More’s Utopia to conclude that the founding text is an open-ended work that employs the dialogic strategy on a variety of levels and thus itself constitutes a utopia of dialogue, where the speakers are also listeners, and their exchange is intended as an overture and an invitation to further debate. The chapter finishes with a reading of a scene from David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club as an example of a momentary instantiation of utopia “in its most basic,” “minimal” (88) form of dialogue (synonymous to the minimal utopia of love as defined by Badiou and discussed in the book’s sixth chapter). While concluding that “the entirety of Utopia might be understood as a figuration of the utopian potential of listening” (90) and explicating the notion of “deep listening” as theorized and discussed in the works of Theodor Reik, Jacques Lacan, and the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, Wegner observes that the primary aim of Bayard’s book, More’s Utopia, and the dialogic scene in Fight Club is education of desire.In the first part of chapter 3, “Beyond Ethical Reading; or Reading Again the James-Wells Debate,” Wegner summarizes the two writers’ contrasting approaches toward the art and ethos of novel writing and demonstrates how the critics’ moralizing ethical assessments of their crafts tend to favor James’s view on what constitutes a well-composed novel. He then proceeds to read the James–Wells debate through the lens of Jameson’s post-ethical criticism, which advocates formulating alternative analytical strategies only after a prolonged and careful engagement with all aspects of earlier practices. After addressing the key points of disagreement between the two writers alongside the relevant scholarly commentaries the author refocuses onto generic considerations and, using the observations of Richard Chase (The American Novel and Its Tradition [1957]), Fredric Jameson, and reflections of the moralizing critics, explains the radical difference between James’s and Wells’s works by the latter’s affiliation with the spatially oriented genre of science fiction, evolved from the romance and concentrating on “bringing into purview the historicity of the [fictional] worlds” (115). In his conclusion, Wegner recognizes modern-day revisions of the romance literary tradition, which he sees exemplified by the works of David Mitchell, as a way toward expanding the possibilities of fiction, and potentially hailing the end of the hegemonic view of the novel as outlined by Henry James.The book’s part 2, “Reading Utopia,” contains four chapters where Wegner focuses on analyzing texts representative of the four evental genres. The focus of chapter 4 is W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1909 historical study John Brown, that at the time of its publication radically challenged the dominant understanding of the abolitionist’s actions at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and Pottawatomie, Kansas. As Wegner points out, the historian’s decision to read the subject of his study within the political rather than ethical interpretive framework allowed him to see Brown’s violent actions as necessary under the historical circumstances and, more importantly, place them in the context of the global black antislavery struggle. According to Wegner, as a work that offered an alternative narration disproving the contemporaneous presupposition of lack of collective agency among people of color and inscribed the failed revolution in the long history of antislavery resistance, Du Bois’s study can be read as an example of Susan Buck-Morrs’s genre of universal history that postulates the understanding of global resistance as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon. Relating the work to his understanding of universal history as an evental genre, Wegner notes that John Brown’s actions, interpreted by Du Bois as inevitable and transformative for the course of history, were occurrences transpiring in evental moments of rupture.In the fifth chapter the author undertakes an examination of Karen Blixen’s short story, “Babette’s Feast,” as an example of the evental genre of Künstlerroman, and compares it to its 1987 film adaptation directed by Gabriel Axel. Working on the premise that a Künstlerroman may present a concrete utopia (sensu Bloch), only when failing to depict the central work of art associated with the protagonist becoming an artist, Wegner explains that the film version, which visualizes the eponymous feast unrepresented in the story and eliminates the direct references to the Paris Commune present in the original, reduces the concrete utopia of Blixen’s text to an abstract utopia. Noting the intersection between the political involvement of Blixen’s protagonist in the Paris events and her dedication to art, he argues that the instantiations of concrete utopia in the text are directly related to Babette’s identity as an artist and a Communard, an “artistic and political subject” (166). As he then observes, concrete utopia that manifests in the story in the form of the evental eponymous feast served to humble diners can be interpreted as a “reactivation” of “the radically original experience of the production and consumption of art briefly realized in the Commune” (159).In chapter 6 Wegner analyzes the 2004 film 50 First Dates, directed by Peter Segal, as an example of the comedy of remarriage defined by Andrew Cavell in Pursuit of Happiness (1981). Recognizing Segal’s film as a particularly fitting example of the genre Wegner concentrates his analysis on the structures of repetitions—according to Cavell an indispensable feature of the comedy of remarriage—and relates them to the notion of Badiou’s key condition of love, or “minimal communism,” and Bloch’s understanding of marriage as utopia (The Principle of Hope [1954]). While distinguishing between the destructive, individualistic recurrence and life-affirming collective repetition and evoking the difference between abstract and concrete utopia, the author identifies in the film a concrete figuration of utopia achieved through the quotidian effort of building and renewal of bonds that aptly illustrates the protagonist’s fidelity to the evental encounter of the “first date.”In the seventh chapter Wegner continues his discussion of the comedy of remarriage as employed in two science fiction novels—Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) and Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds (2013)—while explicating what he sees as an important difference between science fiction and utopia: whereas in the former the Novum is found in the domain of science, utopian texts feature events in all of Badiou’s conditions: science, politics, art, and love. To illustrate his argument, he demonstrates the presence of the four conditions in Bellamy’s Looking Backward and points out that the pattern can be found, for instance, in the apparently non-utopian classic—James Joyce’s Ulysses—as well as in the fictional utopias of the 1970s and in modern utopian fiction, as exemplified by the works of Lord and Robinson discussed in the chapter.The brief concluding chapter, “Optimism and Pessimism in Cloud Atlas,” offers an astute discussion of the structural affinity between Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Wells’s The Time Machine, and a comparison between the former novel and its 2012 film adaptation by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer. In the cinematic version of Cloud Atlas Wegner identifies a series of utopias prefigured in the final moments of the film’s subplots and in its concluding sequence. Referring to the work’s powerful, hopeful message and evoking Antonio Gramsci, the author concludes his work with a statement of faith in the utopian potential of the present and a call for collective optimism of the will.Invoking Hope is undoubtedly a rich work whose engagement with theory and utopia is both serious and inspiringly playful. Alongside the book’s many praiseworthy features, a few reservations need to be expressed. Even careful (non-)readers of Invoking Hope may find themselves challenged whenever complex theoretical palimpsests and multiple erudite cross-references that make for a particularly rich and rewarding reading experience cloud or detract from argumentation. As an illustration, in the second chapter the comprehensive critical account of deep listening appears to eclipse the analytical component in the examination of a scene from David Fincher’s Fight Club when the argument on the figuration of a concrete utopia therein is supported by only scarce evidence from the film.A different type of difficulty relates to the author’s usage of the semiotic square. Whereas, for example, its employment in chapter 1, or chapter 4, where it maps out Wegner’s four evental genres with relation to Badiou’s four conditions; Lacan’s orders and discourses; and Nietzsche’s moralities, very helpfully demonstrates the foundations and the operation of the author’s approach, in chapter two where it is used with regard to Bayard’s conceptualization of the various types of nonreading and nonjourneying, the Greimasian tool does not seem to add much to the discussion, especially given the fact that the author leaves its immediate practicality unexplained.A minor problem with the book emerges when, in marked contrast to all the other sections of the second part, the fourth chapter does not explicitly relate to utopianism as such. The only specific mentions of utopia are found in the chapter’s mottos and the interpolated section that sketches out the author’s theory of the evental genres.A final reservation some readers may have concerns the somewhat paradoxical relationship between the book’s pronounced dialogism and its political penchant: it appears that when the objective of the pursuit of hope shifts the work’s tenor toward that of a political manifesto, one may find its overall impact weakened as the thought-provoking hermeneutic tensions are repeatedly resolved with an indication of communism as the sole source of hope.Nonetheless, it must be clearly stated that Invoking Hope is a remarkably inspirational work that is bound to ignite a creative spark in various kinds of its nonreaders. Its second part, which underscores the interrelationships between Wegner’s four evental genres, provides a further explication and exemplification of the author’s theory previously discussed in The Shockwaves of Possibility. Undoubtedly, its wide applicability and the potential significance of the perspectives it opens is a valuable scholarly contribution in its own right, and a must-read for scholars of utopia and science fiction.Above all, however, the book deserves our close attention for its application and encouragement of education through and for dialogue as a “practice of freedom,” a source of understanding and hope for the future.3 The abovementioned reservations are less important when Invoking Hope is viewed as faithful to the overriding themes of reading for utopia and educating desire that unite its two parts and the chapters therein into a text that well exemplifies purposeful intellectual utopian practice.Despite the probable difficulties involved in studying a work with such a daring and enthusiastic approach to theory, it is obvious that the cross-pollination of concepts and approaches resulting from Wegner’s analytical angle must and does expand critical horizons by multiplying perspectives: with every language of theory introducing new vantage points, undermining the (potential, or worse, unavoidable) solidity of the preexisting critical methodology, and pointing new directions of inquiry.In this context, laudable is also Wegner’s “disposable canon” proposed in Invoking Hope, where two texts fundamental for utopian studies—More’s Utopia and Plato’s Republic—are juxtaposed and analyzed alongside and against, among others, a modern-day screwball comedy film, a historical biography from the beginning of the twentieth century, a fragment of a conversation with a tour guide, and Republic’s hypertranslation by Badiou. As his choice of texts evidences, Wegner takes up Jameson’s challenge of the “detective work of a decipherment and a reading of Utopian clues and traces in the landscape of the real […] in realities large or small, which may in themselves be far from Utopian in their actuality” (16). The resulting pursuit of “utopian figure[s] momentarily called into being” (87) that the author encourages is a highly rewarding exercise that significantly enriches the bulk of texts discussed in the context of utopian studies—a prospect that is in itself as exciting as it is precarious, given the possible indefinite (?) expansion of the material for utopian scholarly analysis.Irrespective of the doubts one may have regarding the specific employment of the Greimasian device, Wegner’s study proves the point that the square remains a very promising analytical tool, also in the context of utopian studies. In fact, theoretical considerations as broad in scope as those of Badiou stand only to benefit from a more formalistic approach, such as Greimas’s.Most importantly, one needs to note the work’s strong emphasis on a text’s mobility, enhanced by its involvement in communicative exchanges to acquire “the dialectical grasp at once of [their] limitations and possibilities” (Jameson quoted on 12). Thus, in his own attentive and creative approach toward the achievements of classic theoreticians, such as New Critics and Algirdas Greimas, Wegner, inspired by Jameson, successfully proves that it would be a mistake to dismiss their methodological apparatuses wholesale as fossilized, rigid, and inflexible determinants of meaning. The author’s work on the Greimasian square and its Jamesonian applications is a valuable proof that a formalist strategy does not predetermine a closed, finite, “immobilized” reading of the analyzed text, but, on the contrary, may lay open numerous investigative pathways. A valid observation that Wegner makes when pointing to the common mistake made by the detractors of New Criticism can be extended to a number of other products of culture, academic or otherwise: irrespective of one’s ideological position or the current (scholarly) popularity of a given school of thought, we would do well to read with an eye and an ear for the potentially valuable analytical strategies. One of the relevant questions we may be inclined to ask following an encounter with Invoking Hope could be: what theoretical approaches are undervalued and underrepresented in academia, and what perspectives may we gain from their dialogic, creative reading?I believe that many of Wegner’s readers may feel inspired to take up his methods, conclusions, and the willfully optimistic attitude toward the uses of theory and the goals of utopian thinking. As a much-recommended book for all (scholars) with the questing, playful spirit, a heart for the complex, and a hunger for hope, Invoking Hope may be an evental read that will embolden to move in and discover new directions.
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