key: cord-0059566-qg7re2lq
authors: Adamik, Verena
title: ‘To Begin the World Over Again’: Conclusion
date: 2020-12-02
journal: In Search of the Utopian States of America
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-60279-6_8
sha: cf0e2477ea7a9dac5d5a5903e590653de25e9e50
doc_id: 59566
cord_uid: qg7re2lq

By way of a conclusion, I am providing a brief overview of utopian communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as on communal studies and further novels that treat utopian communities. I tentatively argue that the ideas of closure and of privilege still dictate how we think of utopia and nation to this day.

story that mocks the national-utopian narrative. And yet, in Marie Howland's Papa's Own Girl (1874) , the United States hold utopian promise-the nation, internally conflicted by the aftermath of the Civil War, the color line, demands for women's suffrage, and class conflict, will be harmoniously re-united by utopian socialism, which will also result in the radical improvement of romantic relationships. Papa's Own Girl also illustrates that utopianism can be both, progressive (moving toward a more socially just economy and women's economic emancipation) and conservative (maintaining national cohesion, racial segregation, and the institution of marriage).

Where Howland's utopian imagination glosses over conflicts, other authors have highlighted them and seized at the disruptive potential of utopian promises embedded into the nation's founding history. Sutton E. Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899) most drastically illustrates the limitations to utopian production. The Imperium, unable to implement any change because of its ideological boundedness, that is, its location within another empire, symbolically remains without geographic territory. As the respective chapter pointed out, Griggs's rendition of utopian practice strongly emphasizes the hold that the non-utopian, or rather dystopian, reality has over the African American population, and that the resulting dissonance between reality and national narrative is an explosive combination. W.E.B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) more optimistically suggests that it might be possible to remove history's 'roots,' and to change the United States. For this purpose, Du Bois's novel refashions literary conventions from the nineteenth century to construct a story that ends in a utopian socialist community. In the novel, the European American bias of US American utopianism is consciously highlighted, to then argue that, not only should African Americans be included in this tradition, but they are the ones who will bring about utopian United States. (I do not want to make any predictions about the effect that the 2020 national and international outrage at anti-Black police brutality in the United States will have. Black Lives Matter protests to current events rightfully decry that the United States still have to make true on their foundational declarations of equality. I have repeatedly wondered what the authors of the works discussed here would have to say to these developments.) In this way further developing a historical psychology of utopian production, I hope to have outlined new pathways for utopian studies and, ultimately, to have extended the knowledge of 'America' as utopia.

From this, a short glimpse forward at utopian communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seems appropriate. Communalism in the United States waxed and waned, yet it never completely died out. In fact, the 1930s saw enough intentional communities established so that by 1940, a network to share resources and knowledge among these utopian projects was founded: The Fellowship of Intentional Communities (now the 'Foundation for Intentional Community'). 1 Yet, the utopian communities of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered most prominently; especially rural hippie communes-such as Drop City in Colorado (1965 , Morning Star Ranch in California (1967 -1973 ), Twin Oaks in Virginia (1967 , The Farm in Tennessee (1971-present) , and Black Bear Ranch in California (1968-present)-inform mainstream ideas of what intentional communities may look like, who the members are, and what problems they will face. Indeed, these communities were part of a peak in utopian practice in the United States: "In the mid-1960s communitarian idealism erupted in what was to be by far its largest manifestation ever, when hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million, of mostly young Americans sought to rebuild from the ground up what they perceived as a rotten, decadent society" (Miller 2002, 327) . While 'hippie communes' received much of media attention and are widely known examples of utopian practice to this day, closer investigation reveals that "the hip communes were a minority in the overall communal scene. The thousands of religiously committed communes often sharply limited sexual activity and prohibited all drugs, including tobacco, alcohol, and psychedelics. A key to understanding the communes of the Sixties era is that they were enormously, endlessly diverse. … The thousands of intentional communities that embodied the subject at hand included Asian religious ashrams, group marriage experiments, communal rock bands, 'Jesus freak' houses, centers of radical politics, and back-to-the-land experiments in agricultural self-sufficiency. The variation was endless, mind-boggling" (Miller 2002, 328-329) . Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, utopian practice in the United States continues to be fascinatingly multifaceted: some planned entire cities such as Soul City in North Carolina (first plans published in 1969 and still populated, even though it never took off as envisioned), or NewVistas in Vermont (planned by the millionaire David Hall, who was inspired by the urban planning of Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Mormon faith, but NewVistas never came to fruition despite all of Hall's money). Others, such as the Friends of Perfection Commune, also known as Kaliflower, in San Francisco, California (1967-continuing under different names in different projects to this day), form communities within cities. Some even run hostels, such as the International Guest House in St. Petersburg, Florida (which was kind enough to host me and some fellow utopian scholars for a short time).

Over the last decades, ecovillages such as Dancing Rabbit in Missouri (1997-present) have risen in popularity. Many, such as Dancing Rabbit and the Farm, offer internships, open weekends, and share their knowledge online and in seminars, so that others may follow on the path to a communally organized good place. Urban utopian practice revolving around communal/guerilla gardening is another recent trend. Utopian communities have often networked in one way or another, and the Foundation for Intentional Community and the Whole Earth Catalogue (founded in the 1960s and continuing in spin-offs to the present day) are just two examples for this continuous exchange. Now, the internet offers plenty of resources and means of contact. Prepper/survivalist communities have also become more common over the last decades: in this case, the fear of a catastrophic end of the world as we know it, brought about by a pandemic, or by terrorism, or by climate change, or by a world conspiracy, or by an asteroid, and so on, and the resulting dystopian order inspire something that, weirdly enough, recalls utopian practice-secluded communities dedicated to a previously agreed-upon social structure. Their 'social dreaming' is a reaction to a fearful nightmare and, I would reason, usually revolves around survival more than the creation of a good place. However, they are certainly intentional, and maybe the illusion of preparedness and control constitutes radical improvement for them.

Utopian/intentional/independent communities of the past hundred years or so are often associated with the horrors that psychological dependence on a charismatic leader can bring about. Unforgotten are the murders committed by the Manson Family (1969), the mass-suicide of the People's Temple in Jonestown (1978) , and the crimes planned and committed in association with the Osho community Rajneeshpuram (1984 Rajneeshpuram ( /1985 . Various historical and psychological factors appear to make those seeking to live in a radically improved manner particularly prone to radicalism, as well as vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation (see Kaplan and Lööw 2002) . Examples of dystopian communities have created a widespread prejudice regarding utopian communities in general (Boal 2012, 135-150; Melton 2002, 272; Sargent 2013, 71) .

Attempts to immediately realize visions of a better place continue to fascinate, and so utopian communities repeatedly find their way into literature. For example, Caroline Dale Snedeker, Robert Owen's greatgranddaughter, wrote a romance set in Owen's New Harmony: Seth Way (1917). Snedeker's novel is, just as The Blithedale Romance had foretold, a distinctly US American romance set in the nation's utopian past; so is Marguerite Young's Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945) which also plays in New Harmony (in its Rappite and in its Owenite phase). Since the 1960s, hippie communities dominate in literature. Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968) on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters may be the most famous; another widely read non-fiction account would be Vincent Bugliosi's true-crime work on the Manson family, Helter Skelter (1974) . Around the turn of the millennium, various novels that deal with hippie(ish) back-to-the-land communes have surfaced and sold well, such as Ken Follett's The Hammer of Eden (1998), T.C. Boyle's Drop City (2003) , and Lauren Groff's Arcadia (2012). Utopian communities also feature in bestselling sf, as in Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), and in Edan Lepucky's California (2014), which relate intentional communities to gated communities. All of these novels stylize utopian communities as part of a national tradition, with the 1960s serving as yet another piece of evidence (maybe the most commonly remembered) for the link between utopianism and nation. One famous fictional community-the backpacker resort/commune in Alex Garland's The Beach (1996)-employs this setting to reflect on US American imperialism.

The discussions on Griggs's and Du Bois's work exemplified that postcolonial or anti-imperial utopianism 2 and its relation to the nation are still deserving of more academic attention. Scholars would do well to keep in mind that utopianism means detailing a social vision in a very particular way and that changes to these conventions-man-made, systemic, wholesale, total, and possibly imperial-are significant. They require rethinking the proposed utopian genealogy and its relation to a powerful discourse that originates with early modern Europe. For example, Nalo Hopkinson's The Midnight Robber (2000) is in many ways too fantastic, too ambiguous, and too dynamic to fit the utopian mold and in this way offers important pointers regarding the utopian imagination in relation to diaspora and transgenerational trauma. Stephen Graham Jones (2003) in The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto details through various storylines why White, Eurocentric utopianism, complete with seclusion and so on, provides no viable anti-imperial strategy for Native American cultures.

The various literary representations of utopian communities attest to a continued interest in living out the 'social dreaming' of utopianism. In addition to novelists, academic researchers and journalists periodically take up the topic and have produced a range of documentaries and articles, in tones alternating between fascination and skepticism. I personally noticed that when I try to explain the objective of my research, many people readily point out all the ways in which social dreamers fail. Most (including, often, me) certainly find it easier to critique and belittle than to imagine the end of capitalism-to recall the famous quote by Fredric Jameson (1994, xii)-and to explain why one does not put one's social dreaming into action.

The very idea of utopian practice invites accusations of failure. Even though reality seldom is as orderable as imaginary utopian space and the utopian people within it, the term utopia suggests that "one of their [utopian communities] primary aims is the creation of an enduring social world" following their "ideal social orders" (Kanter 1973, 502) . If utopian practice is held to the requirements of stasis and perfection, then longevity and 'truthfulness' to the original layout become a marker for evaluating whether a community has been a failure. Thus, researchers came to use the time span of twenty-five years (one generation) to evaluate the success of any intentional community (see Sargent 2013 ). Yet, this focus on longevity-which then also shaped the research objectives, which would focus on reasons for success or failure, and on those communities that 'last'-obscures that communities may be in flux. Members may migrate, form new projects, or the communal structure may dissolve but a movement continue. One example would be the aforementioned Sutter/ Scott Street commune/Kaliflower/Friends of Perfection Commune, which relocated, renamed itself, and disseminated into a variety of communal projects (a communal garden, a communal food pantry, various co-ops, etc.). Another example is the Amana Society, a religious settlement established in Iowa in 1856 that abandoned communal life in 1932 but continues as a "living religious movement" (Pitzer 1997, xvii) .

Consequently, over the last decades, communal scholar Donald E. Pitzer advocated developmental communalism, broadening the definition and the scope of the research objectives of communal studies by viewing "communal living [as] a generic social mechanism available to all peoples, governments, and movements" (Pitzer 2013, 34) . In this paradigm, utopian practice is not evaluated by how well it comes to represent a static and closed-off utopian island but in how far it manages to survive in interaction with the non-utopian reality. On the other hand, intentional communities may hold communal living to be the goal, not a means to an end. In those cases, developmental communalism obscures the actual intention of the community (Sargent 2013, 67) . Furthermore, the attraction that communalism, but also neatly controllable space exerts can be observed to this day and should not be underestimated: digging a trench appears attractive to those opposing a world in which capitalism runs rampant, 3 and to those who are enamored with nationalism and even imperialism. Writing these concluding lines from my home office in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of small, isolated communities suddenly has taken on completely different relevance. As have national borders and utopian orderability: at this very moment, various nations try to control the habits of their people down to small details, often failing when not taking strict disciplinary measures. The word 'dystopia' is tossed about with inflationary frequency; yet it remains to be seen how these fears affect the utopian imagination, and how the Utopian States will fare hereafter.

The question that this book turned to was never whether visions of better worlds are viable, but to focus on the attempts to get there. It zeroed in on the fantasy mechanisms of utopian production by looking at how fiction dealt with the first steps toward realizing a utopia. All the books discussed have stressed the importance of how we narrate (community, economics, empire, gender, nation, race, romance, space, time) can pave the way for what we do. Yet, they all related these new narratives to the United States. The authors wrote national histories that correspond to their respective attitudes toward the Utopian States of America, illustrating that this discourse was regarded with suspicion and at the same time often probed for its subversive potential, its "power to begin the world over again" (Paine 1776, 40) . However, these engagements also illustrate the pervasiveness of the grand national narrative in the nineteenth century. Even when asserting that the socioeconomic order of the United States can and needs to be radically changed, these attempts are, much like the corpse of Griggs's protagonist, "shrouded in an American flag" (1899, 261) . In these instances, limitations do not originate with the pessimistic belief that there is 'no alternative,' the alleged "practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and which stands as a testimony to the power of that system" (Fitting 1998, "Concept" 8) . Instead, the utopian optimism illustrates the hold of the United States over the utopian imagination. If utopianism is "a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet" (Jameson 2005, xii) then the examples discussed in this book traced a different kind of "weakness" of the imagination (to recall Jameson 1994, xii) , in which all the 'sparks' are the tail of a comet that is the United States. In many ways, most of these works hold that their vision of a good place can be realized and would transform the United States. Yet, in the end, all these envisioned beginnings were America.

Landscapes of Hope. Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America

Introduction: Spaces of Utopia

Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism

Drop City

Helter Skelter. The True Story of the Manson Murders

Parable of the Sower

The Quest of the Silver Fleece

The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson

The Hammer of Eden. London: Pan Macmillan. Garland, Alex. 1996. The Beach

Imperium in Imperio. A Study of the Negro Race Problem

Islands and Empire: Beyond the Shores of Utopia

The Blithedale Romance

Midnight Robber

Papa's Own Girl

The Emigrants, or the History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols

Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

The Bird is Gone. A Manifesto. Salt Lake City: Fiction Collective Two

Utopian Communities

The Cultic Milieu. Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization

Postcolonial Utopias or Imagining 'Brave New Worlds': Caliban Speaks Back. Spaces of Utopia

California. New York: Little, Brown, and Company

The Modern Anti-Cult Movement in Historical Perspective

The Sixties Era Communes

Two Hundred Years of American Communes

Common Sense

The Myths That Made America. An Introduction to American Studies

Developmental Communalism into the Twenty-First Century

The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia. A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures

Theorizing Intentional Community in the Twenty-First Century

Seth Way. A Romance of the New Harmony Community

Communal Utopias and the American Experience

Utopia in the Age of Globalization. Space, Representation, and the World-System

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Angel in the Forest. A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias. Normal: Dalkey Archive