NOTES TOWARDS A UTOPIA
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from future to past, a deflection of the original "futuristic" impetus.
As a result, no complete image, or no image endowed with the
necessary physical and operational features, of the desirable order
emerges at the end of most treatises. It is both the prerogative
and the limitation of ideology that all it can breed is fresh ideol–
ogies. But while the architecture of ideas is surely of the essence, it
is still not sufficient to create the kind of assent by which a Utopia
will stand or, in the absence of such assent, fall.
Closely connected with this difficulty is the therapeutic tenor
almost invariahly found in the schemes of the eclectic and scholarly
Utopist. The emphasis is too much on what is wrong with the
present (and past), not enough on what shall be right in the
future. My own notion of Utopia is that it should be not so
much a therapy as a diagnosis: the diagnosis of a state of affairs
the outlines of which we can only dimly discern, but discern all
the same. Our main effort, then, should be one of clarification
and forestallment, rather than of critique, recommendation or
cure.
In this respect (and only in this respect) it seems to me that
the mock Utopias of writers like Orwell and Huxley are sounder,
that is to say, more in keeping with the fundamental intention
of the Utopian concern, than their affirmative analogues. By plac–
ing before the reader an absurd and dreadful but, unfortunately,
possible
state of affairs these writers are exercising the central
diagnostic function of "true" U topism, only in reverse. They pre–
sent what must not be, even as the affirmative Utopist presents
what, ultimately, must be. And as our own age recognizes itself
in their schemes under the mode of caricature, so it should recog–
nize itself in the affirmative Utopias under the mode of consum–
mation, transcendence.
5. I am convinced that most Utopian proposals today, and
for some time past, have been rendered ineffective by the use of
unanalyzed relations. The basic constituents of any society-past,
actual or Utopian-have to be reconsidered, i.e., dialectically
re-ordered, if a new social constellation is sought that would, finally,
do justice to man and his world. Recent Utopists have shirked
this task, either by not inquiring into these basic relations at all–
taking them over, that is, ready-made from some existing system of
