Texter on Jacoby, 'Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age'


Russell Jacoby. Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. x + 240 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-12894-0.

Reviewed by Douglas Texter (Department of English, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.)
Published on H-Utopia (March, 2007)

Of Utopia, More or Less

In Picture Imperfect, Russell Jacoby seeks to understand why utopia's reputation has received such a pounding in the twentieth century, and he works to remove the dents. In addition, he distinguishes between the "blueprint" utopianism of writers such as Thomas More and Edward Bellamy and the "iconoclastic" utopianism of Jewish authors such as Gustav Landauer and Fritz Mauthner. These latter writers "dreamt of a superior society but declined to give its precise measurements" (p. xv). As one would expect of the author of The Last Intellectuals (1987), Jacoby joyfully strides past much recent utopian scholarship and lights out for the territories on his own. This independence of thought occasionally confounds and often delights. In chapter 1, "An Anarchic Breeze," Jacoby explores the reasons for the much-commented-upon decline in utopian thinking after the Second World War. These reasons include the misreading of major dystopian novels, the inaccurate linking of genocide and utopia, and the decline of childhood imagination itself. In chapter 2, "On Anti-Utopianism, More or Less," Jacoby contrasts the "jesting utopianism" of Thomas More's genre-founding work with the author's ruthless attacks against heresy; with More, Jacoby asserts, both utopianism and anti-utopianism begin. Jacoby also provides insight into several post-1945 Jewish liberal attacks against utopian thought. Writers launching salvos include Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon, and Hannah Arendt. Chapter 3, "To Shake the World off its Hinges," gives detailed examinations of two iconoclastic writers, Gustav Landauer and Fritz Mauthner, both of whom believed in utopian ideals of community, but eschewed utopian blueprints. And, finally, chapter four, "A Longing that Cannot Be Uttered," fully explores the implications of the proscription on graven images for Jewish art and utopian writing, including the work of the Frankfurt School Marxists. Perhaps the single most provocative argument in Picture Imperfect is Jacoby's attempt to separate Nazism from utopia. While valiant and well researched, Jacoby's effort might be what Paul Fussell once called David Jones's In Parenthesis: "an honorable miscarriage"; indeed, it seems a well-meaning sidestepping of utopia's productive yet dangerous double edge. As James Scott argues in Seeing Like a State (1999), utopian dreams backed by real political power can lead to state intrusion in people's lives and, sometimes, complete disaster; they do not have to, but they can. Jacoby argues that "even the vaguest description of utopia as a society inspired by notions of happiness, fraternity, and plenty would apparently exclude Nazism" (p. 13). "Virtually nothing," he laments, connects Thomas More's Utopia and Hitler's Mein Kampf (p. 14). And he asserts that by "classifying Nazism as a utopian venture, scholars ratify the anti-utopian bias" (p. 17). Not all utopian visions employ Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Judeo-Christian notions of happiness. Nazism did offer, at least for a very few, a vision of an ideal society; therefore, it must be dealt with as a utopia, no matter how gross its reality. While Jacoby is right that Nazism bore little relation to the projects of More or Bellamy, one thread binding National Socialism to these literary utopias is stasis. In The Rebel, Albert Camus argues that "for Hitler, the insupportable paradox is precisely in wanting to found a stable order on perpetual change and on negation."[1] As Sebastian Haffner notes in The Meaning of Hitler (1979), armed conflict formed an end in and of itself, an anvil on which the German people would be hardened. Driving Tiger tanks and wielding the hammer of Thor, the Nazis confounded the hopes of Neville Chamberlain by intending to wage continuous war. In 1984, which Jacoby briefly discusses, Orwell registers the National Socialist paradox through the Inner Party slogan, "War is Peace." As Camus argues, the Nazis "could not dispense with enemies. Perpetual strife demanded perpetual stimulants."[2] Military adventurism, underpinned by sloppy philosophical borrowing from the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, forms the core ideal of the Nazi utopia. After departing Nazi Germany, Jacoby makes a fascinating side trip into childhood imagination itself: "If unstructured childhood sustains imagination and imagination sustains utopian thinking, then the eclipse of the first entails the weakening of the last--utopian thinking" (p. 30). Beginning with Max Horkheimer's proclamation that modern society wrecks "the utopian dreams of childhood" (p. 25) and continuing on through the work of scholars such as Iona and Peter Opie, Jacoby explores contemporary childhood and concludes that commodification and over-organization of children's lives have contracted the space for utopian dreaming. I wonder, though, if the young's ability to imagine utopia is as feeble as he asserts. For example, today's activists and utopians might trace their longings to toys like Legos, which encourage the building of new (albeit plastic) worlds, and comics like Justice League of America, which in the polyester decade, at least, chased after urban renewal as well as Lex Luthor. While Jacoby's work in the first two chapters is interesting, it is the second half of Picture Imperfect that truly makes a unique contribution to utopian scholarship. Here, Jacoby argues that "for much of their history, the ban on graven images barred Jews from depicting the absolute and by inference the future. In as much as language derives from images and depictions, the taboo also challenged the written word" (p. 102). This proscription, which, Jacoby asserts, profoundly affected the production of Jewish visual art, as well as blueprint utopianism, is explored in detail. One question I have about this argument concerns Jewish architecture, about which Jacoby says very little. What is the explanation of the evidently negative relationship between Jewish architecture and the production of blueprint utopias? Jacoby asserts rightly that "art and utopianism spring from the same soil and confront or circumvent the same taboo" (p. 118). Yet utopianism and architecture, as the recent wave of space/place-related utopian criticism indicates, are also deeply related. But this line of questioning ultimately detracts little from this fascinating section, in which Jacoby asserts that for Judaism, and thus for the iconoclastic utopians, "Painting beguiles, but spoken poetry instructs. The eye misleads; the ear leads" (p. 134).

In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond asserts that God manifests himself differently in every age, and that in the World State, this manifestation is an absence. Mond's dictum may also apply to blueprint utopianism itself. Another reviewer of Picture Imperfect, Terry Eagleton, argued that perhaps Jacoby overemphasizes iconoclastic utopias since blueprints usually precede efforts aiming at feeding, clothing, and housing people.[3] I agree, since such projects form logical extensions of Adorno's assertion in Minima Moralia (1974) that the only utopia worthy of the name is one in which everyone has enough to eat. Sadly, even this most minimal of utopian projects seems shelved for the immediate future. As is the case for Mond's God, utopia manifests itself differently in every age. In our postmodern time, its manifestation may well be the absence of definitive blueprints. If this is true, then the iconoclasts serve to keep the utopian spirit alive for another day by whispering to a world blind to pictures of an ideal society. By attuning our ears to the distant murmur, Russell Jacoby has performed an invaluable service in Picture Imperfect.

Notes

[1]. Albert Camus, The Rebel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), 149.

[2]. Ibid., 150.

[3]. Terry Eagleton, "Just my Imagination," The Nation (June 13, 2005), accessible at www.thenation.com/doc/20050613/eagleton/2.

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Citation: Douglas Texter. Review of Jacoby, Russell, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. H-Utopia, H-Net Reviews. March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12954

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