Utopias of OneLiterary Primitivism

Abstract

Utopia is more often than not a term of embarrassment for the humanities. It finds itself caught between a post–Cold War liberal conviction that system change is a thing of the past and a version of radical criticism that has an easier time naming complicities than imagining alternatives. There have, of course, been scholars who have bucked against these conventions, detecting the positive tremors of utopia emanating from literary and cultural production. Fredric Jameson, for example, has elaborated an ethos of anti-anti-utopianism: a spirited defense of the imagination of other worlds against reactionary attempts to foreclose futurity. In literary and cultural studies, this defense of futurity might be understood as a kind of utopian front that includes a broad array of scholars, such as Jodi Dean, Kara Keeling, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Kathi Weeks, and Phillip E. Wegner.Joshua Kotin’s Utopias of One and Ben Etherington’s Literary Primitivism are likewise efforts to recuperate utopianism. They do so in very different ways. Kotin highlights the ethical lessons to be drawn from utopia’s failures. Etherington parses utopia as a placeholder for noncapitalist social relations. However, the authors share an emphasis on utopia as an aesthetic event.Kotin’s Utopias of One makes a compelling case for utopianism as nonredemptive praxis, an agency whose aim is not to save the world but to subtract from it. Kotin writes, “[T]he texts I examine create perfect worlds by refusing or failing to present models of perfect worlds. Efficacy and divisiveness go hand in hand. For the writers I discuss, the dissolution of community is the first step toward establishing an alternative to community” (2). Kotin’s writers do not simply identify a wrong in society; they try to persuade readers that society itself has gone wrong. Henry David Thoreau left for the woods because America had failed to live up to its dream of independence. It had become another name for dependence and conformity, rather than an experiment in living deliberately. Walden resurrects the American experiment, but it does so only while rendering it impossible, at least as a social ideal: “Thoreau maximizes his independence by creating a world that is radically his own,” (27) but, in doing so, he “risks solipsism at one extreme and mere critique at the other. Ultimately, its effects are asymmetrical and highly improbable: a perfect world that cannot be replicated or shared” (32).Walden is a paradigm for Kotin, a distillation of what writers as discrepant as W. E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Stevens, and Anna Akhmatova search after: a world of their own. This paradigm provides the basis for provocative, often brilliant readings of literary texts. Kotin has a knack for showing how literary form is an event in itself. For example, Du Bois’s practice of recycling the same prose in his autobiographical writings speaks at once to a personal hermeticism—the literary text turns inward on itself, becoming a vehicle through which the author consolidates his own identity—and a political hermeticism—Du Bois “unwaveringly maintains his optimism in communism and the Soviet Union” by “exclud[ing] differences of opinion and differences of identity” (40). One of Kotin’s central claims is that literariness (“literary efficacy”) is itself utopian, because it promises to reconcile intention and expression, agency and act. That this reconciliation is always on the horizon, never quite arriving, doesn’t prevent it from operating as an ethical ideal. The “[d]ifficult texts” that we tend to think of as “literary . . . teach us how to live without reciprocity—to cultivate care for persons and things independent of our personal interests. Difficult texts, in other words, teach us to be altruistic” (137). This ethical spirit is the book’s great strength but also its limitation: altruism is a moral virtue, but it can also serve as an alibi—a way of muting political contention. Kotin’s analyses do a wonderful job of locating the formal ambiguities of literary texts, but they do so in a manner that sometimes makes it easy to forget the kinship between utopianism and politics. In short, the price of identifying utopianism with literary efficacy may be the inadvertent fabrication of a oneness whose consistency depends on eliding political difference.Etherington’s Literary Primitivism, in contrast, not only insists on politics but does so in a polemical fashion. Etherington salvages the aesthetic project of primitivism from the critical disrepute into which it has fallen. He contends that the “moral and methodological consensus” (or “poststructural eclipse”) that reduces primitivism to an “ideological reflex” substitutes the fetishization of “the Other” for a critical reckoning with social contradiction (12). This critique of scholarly orthodoxy connects to Etherington’s second polemic, namely, that primitivism can be divided into “philo-primitivism” (“a broad interest or felt affinity for the primitive” [20]) and “emphatic primitivism,” (“the urgent desire to become primitive, a condition whose fulfillment would require no less than an exit from the capitalist world-system” [33]). Postmodern criticism fails to recognize that, more than a vague lust for the exotic, primitivism proper is a social project that “seeks guidance from the remnants of noncapitalist societies conceived as self-sufficient totalities” (ibid.). Ultimately, primitivism has a “decolonial horizon,” meaning that it doesn’t simply react against colonialism but positively articulates the vision of an elsewhere beyond capitalism and colonialism alike.Nor is emphatic primitivism confined to “the West.” The writers on whom Etherington focuses span the geopolitical map, including D. H. Lawrence, Claude McKay, and Aimé Césaire. Each figure bears witness to the fact that literary primitivism is more than a fantasy, its “subjective discontent” grounded in the “objective remnant” of noncapitalist social relations (9). Thus, in one of the book’s most compelling chapters, Etherington reads Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre as variations on what Sartre terms “the aesthetic modification of the human project” (100). Although Sartre may be clueless about what it means to be black in colonial conditions, the three authors share a desire to discover spontaneous freedom in situations mediated by capitalist imperialism. Etherington explains: “Césaire’s Cahier remains a startling work because it discovered a mode in which poetic abandonment was not premised on naiveté and in which the immediate could be seized without succumbing to the mediate. The Cahier, and Fanon’s activation of it, also serves as a riposte to those later critics who would, in proclaiming that everything is mediated and constructed, jettison any faith in or evidence of alternate social worlds” (105).Etherington makes a compelling case for understanding primitivism as an example of what philosopher Ernst Bloch terms concrete utopia, or the real possibility of another world buried in the historical misery of the present. At the same time, Etherington’s polemicism—his tendency to categorize literary and scholarly texts as either good or bad takes on primitivism—sometimes undermines the subtlety of his own analyses, constructing a version of utopia that is less a concrete alternative to capitalism than a placeholder for moral purity. What both Kotin and Etherington demonstrate, each with a brilliance all their own, is the necessity, as well as the difficulty, of imagining utopia without succumbing to the ease of moral certitudes.