Utopias and temporo-spatial invention: reading More with Marin

Abstract

Louis Marin views Utopia as the organization of space in a discourse that finds its expression in specific texts from More's onwards. He argues that More's text contains non-congruent spaces - internal gaps and fissures in the geography of Utopia unwittingly betrayed by the description of More's traveller - and that these point to places of argument awaiting an as-yet unformulated theory of society in an era of capitalism. It is here suggested that, even as Marin thus presents Utopia as organized space, his analysis is driven by time, primarily the historical time that produces Marx, whose social theory Marin projects backwards on to More's work. Marin's retro-projective approach, for all the remarkable insights it generates, leaves underexamined the question of how early modern utopianism may be said to have imagined space in historical time and, in so doing, emerged as a tradition of invention.