Russell Jacoby's Picture Imperfect

...Left authoritarianism is itself a defense against anxiety—a way to assimilate frightening anarchy into familiar patterns of hierarchy and moral demand—as is the fundamentalist backlash taking place not only in the United States but around the world...

...indeed, liberation had a tendency to become prescriptive, so that freedom to reject the trappings of middle-class consumerism, or not to marry, or to be a lesbian was repackaged as a moral obligation and a litmus test of one's radicalism or feminism...

...That the culture war instigated by the 1960s revolt shows no signs of abating thirtysome years later is usually cited by its left and liberal opponents to condemn it as a disastrous provocation that put the right in power...

...Not coincidentally, the cultural debates, however attenuated, still conjure the ghosts of utopia by raising issues of personal autonomy, power, and the right to enjoy rather than slog through life...

...Both books trace the assumptions of today's anti-utopian consensus to the thirties and forties, when liberal intellectuals— most notably Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin—linked Nazism and communism under the rubric of totalitarianism, whose essential characteristic, they proposed, was the rejection of liberal pluralism for a monolithic ideology...

...on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, "opportunity" and "ownership," to the libertarian right...

...To this end, Jacoby distinguishes between two categories of utopianism: the dominant "blueprint" tradition, exemplified by Thomas More's eponymous no place or Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and the dissident strain he calls "iconoclastic" utopianism, whose concern is challenging the limits of the existing social order and expanding the boundaries of imagination rather than planning the perfect society...

...Again, the sixties offers many examples—particularly its most successful social movement, second wave feminism, which achieved mass proportions in response to the radical proposition that men and women should be equals not only under the law or on the job but in every social sphere from the kitchen to the nursery to the bedroom to the street...

...Similar tropes made their way into the sixties' movements, in, for instance, the argument that oppressors should not have free speech or that the American people were the problem, not the solution, and the proper function of American radicals was to support third world anti-imperialism by any means necessary, including violence...

...If anxiety is the flip side of desire, perhaps what we need to do is start asking ourselves and our fellow citizens what we want...

...If freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, as Janis Joplin-cum-Kris Kristofferson famously opined, this could be a propitious moment to reopen a discussion of the utopian dimension of politics and its possible uses for our time...

...Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming...

...Communism was corrupted by a scientific (or more accurately, scientistic) theory of history that cast opponents as expendable, a theory of class that dismissed bourgeois democratic liberties as merely a mask for capitalist exploitation, and a revolutionary practice that allowed a minority to impose dictatorship...

...I'd argue that a confluence of events stimulated desire while temporarily muting anxiety...

...As the logic of this argument would have it, attempts to understand and change a social system as a whole are by definition ideological, which is to say dogmatic...

...DISSENT / Fan 2005 91...

...So the formulation of the problem may need to be fine-tuned: what is it that fosters, or blocks, that sense of possibility/ necessity...

...In the post-communist world, Jacoby laments, the equation of utopia with death has become conventional wisdom across the political board...

...If the original point of these movements was to promote the pursuit of happiness, too often the emphasis shifted to proclaiming one's own superior enlightenment and contempt for those who refused to be liberated...

...Here, Jacoby's analysis intersects with a fear he has long shared with his Frankfurt School mentors—that a mass culture obsessed with images flattens the imagination and perhaps destroys it altogether...

...Our culture of images notwithstanding, it cannot fairly be said that Americans' capacity for fantasy is impaired, even if it takes sectarian and apocalyptic rather than utopian forms...

...The iconoclastic tradition is mainly Jewish, and Jacoby, in an interesting bit of discursus, links it to the biblical prohibition of idolatry...

...Is IT ALSO impossibly abstract...

...ELLEN WILLIS writes on cultural politics and political culture and directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program in the Department of Journalism at New York University...

...rather, both impulses appear to have a common root in the perception that something other than what is is possible—and necessary...

...In the cold war context, Nazism fadDISSENT / Fall 2005 87 BOOKS ed into the background...

...Meanwhile, during the dot-com boom, enthusiastic young free marketeers fomented a mini-revival of sixties liberationism, reencoded as the quest for global entrepreneurial triumph, new technological toys, and limitless information...

...There was widespread prosperity that made young people feel secure, able to challenge authority and experiment with their lives...

...Jacoby will have none of this...

...Never mind that passionate radicals such as Emma Goldman condemned the Soviet regime in the name of their own utopian vision or that most of the past century's horrors have been perpetrated by such decidedly non-utopian forces as religious fanaticism, nationalism, fascism, and other forms of racial and ethnic bigotry...

...it goes against our most deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian definitions of morality and order...

...Who could give credence to phrases like "workers' control" or "women's emancipation" when they had come to mean anything but...

...It is perhaps this bias that has kept him from seeing one reason why the anti-utopian argument has become so entrenched: although there is perversity in it, and bad faith, there is also some truth...

...In telling contrast, the contemporary left has not posed class questions in these terms...

...Because the contradiction could never be admitted, whole populations were forced to speak and act as if the lies of the regime were true...

...ergo, utopianism leads to mass murder...

...RUSSELL JACOBY, one of the few radicals to consistently reject the accommodationist pull, has been trying to nudge us toward such a conversation for some time...

...Who could tell what even the most steadfast anti-Stalinists might do if they actually gained some power...

...Yet that short-lived, anomalous upheaval has had a more profound effect on my thinking about the possibilities of politics than the following three decades of reaction...

...Jacoby notes with indignation that some proponents of the anti-utopian syllogism have tried to get around this latter fact by labeling movements like Nazism and radical Islamism "utopian''—as I write, David Brooks has just made use of this ploy in the New York Times— as if there is no distinction worth making between a universalist tradition devoted to "notions of happiness, fraternity, and plenty" and social "ideals" that explicitly mandate the mass murder of so-called inferior races or the persecution of infidels...

...Similarly, the future of the iconoclasts is "heard and longed for" rather than seen...

...We scared ourselves...

...he rightly insists, "Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms...

...BUT IT' S NOT ONLY corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape...

...The sixties scared us, and not only because of the Weatherman and Charles Manson...

...the critique of totalitarianism became a critique of communism and was generalized to all utopian thinking— that is, to any political aspiration that went beyond piecemeal reform...

...From this perspective, the iconoclasts' elision of the image is itself radically countercultural...

...From Bill Clinton's impeachment to the Terri Schiavo case, the public has resisted the right wing's efforts to close the deal on the cul90 DISSENT / Fall 2005 BOOKS ture...

...These questions are an obvious project for a third book, though it's one Jacoby is unlikely to write: he is temperamentally a refusenik, like the iconoclasts he lauds, more attuned to distant hoofbeats than to spoor on the ground that might reward analysis...

...It couldn't happen, according to the reigning intellectual currents of the fifties, but it did...

...Why does it seem so utterly absent today (you're out of your mind...

...There was a vibrant mass mediated culture that, far from damping down the imagination, transmitted the summons to freedom and pleasure far more broadly than a mere political movement could do...

...With Picture Imperfect, Jacoby takes on larger and more philosophical questions about the nature of utopia and of the human imagination—too large, actually, to be adequately addressed in this quite short hook, which has a somewhat diffuse and episodic quality as a result...

...She is currently at work on a book about the mass psychology of contemporary politics...

...Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it...

...After all, the left has tried everything else, from postmodern rejection of "master narratives" and universal values to Anybody But Bush...

...At bottom, utopia equals death is a statement about the wages of sin...

...The End of Utopia is primarily concerned with the impact of this brand of thinking on the left...

...There was the advent of psychedelics, which allowed millions of people to sample utopia as a state of mind...

...Picture Imperfect is really part two of a meditation that Jacoby began in 1999 with The End of Utopia, a ferocious polemic against anti-utopian thought...

...The striking characteristic of communism was the radical disconnection between the social ideals it professed and the actual societies it produced...

...Jacoby links the decline of utopian thought to the collapse of communism in 1989, and that is surely part of the story, but in truth the American backlash against utopianism was well underway by the mid-seventies...

...There was a critical mass of educated women who could not abide the contradiction between the expanding opportunities they enjoyed as middle-class Americans and the arbitrary restrictions on their sex...

...The reason is not (to summarize the conversation-stopping accusations routinely aimed at anyone who suggests that sixties political and cultural radicalism might offer other than negative lessons for the left) that I am stuck in a time warp, nursing a romantic attachment to my youth, and so determined to idealize a period that admittedly had its politically dicey moments...

...The DISSENT / Fall 2005 89 BOOKS prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety...

...Jacoby is no fan of authoritarian communism, but he is wrong in thinking he can simply bracket that disaster or that there is nothing to be learned from it that might apply to utopian movements in general...

...Jacoby persuasively analyzes 1984 to show that it was not meant as an anti-socialist tract, yet he never mentions the attacks on the misuse of language that made Orwell's name into an adjective...

...Further, Jacoby argues, in the Kabbala and in Jewish tradition generally, the Torah achieves full meaning only through the oral law: "The ear trumps the eye...

...While he does not simply write off the blueprinters—fussy as their details may be, he regards them as contributors to the utopian spirit and credits them with inspiring social reforms—his heroes are the iconoclasts, beginning with Ernst Bloch and his 1918 The Spirit of Utopia, and including a gallery of anarchists, refusers, and mystics ranging from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse to Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber...

...From the smug 1950s to the post-Reagan era, in which a bloodied and cowed left has come to regard a kinder, gentler capitalism as its highest aspiration, this anti-utopian trend has been interrupted only by the brief but intense flare-up of visionary politics known as "the sixties...

...As one of the movement's prominent utopians, Shulamith Firestone, put it, the initial response of most women to that idea was, "You must be out of your mind—you can't change that...

...Nor—in the sense of ceasing to cast a shadow over the present—can it really be said to be over, even in this age of "9/11 Changed Everything...

...Was this just one more example of the amazing power of capitalism to turn every human impulse to its own purposes— or, given the right circumstances, might the force of desire overflow that narrow channel...

...Even as utopianism is condemned as deadly, it is at the same time, and often by the same people, dismissed as ir88 DISSENT / Fall 2005 BOOKS relevant to the real world...

...And yet there are more Americans than ever before who have tasted certain kinds of social freedoms and, whether they admit it or not, don't want to give them up or deny them to others...

...they violate the pluralistic nature of social life and so can only be enforced through terror...

...Those were different times...

...Jacoby is on to something, though, about the importance of the ear: the key mass cultural form, from the standpoint of inciting utopianism, was rock and roll...

...Yet it seems likely that the relationship of the utopian imagination and the urge to concrete political activity is not precisely one of cause and effect...

...Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands...

...Just as communism discredited utopianism for several generations of Europeans, the antics of countercultural moralists fed America's conservative reaction...

...it attacks the array of "progressive" spokespeople who insist that we must accept the liberal welfare state as the best we can hope for, as well as the multiculturalists who have reinvented liberal pluralism, celebrating "diversity" and "inclusiveness" within a socioeconomic system whose fundamental premises are taken for granted...

...Just as the Jews may neither depict God's image nor pronounce God's name, so the iconoclasts avoid explicit images or descriptions of the utopian future...

...A milder form of authoritarianism, which owed less to Marxism than to a peculiarly American quasi-religious moralism, disfigured the counterculture and the women's movement...

...The answers might surprise us...

...and how can we change that...

...For the fury of the religious right is clearly a case of protesting too much, its preoccupation with sexual sin a testament to the magnitude of the temptation (as the many evangelical sex scandals suggest...

...Rather, as I see it, the enduring interest of this piece of history lies precisely in its spectacular departure from the norm...

...The problem today," Jacoby recognizes in his epilogue, "is how to connect utopian thinking with everyday politics...

...Alone, the written word may mislead: it is too graphic...

...How did the sixties happen in the first place...

...Yet the same set of facts can as plausibly be regarded as evidence of the potent and lasting appeal of its demand that society embrace freedom and pleasure as fundamental values...

...PICTURE IMPERFECT: UTOPIAN THOUGHT FOR AN ANTI-UTOPIAN AGE by Russell Jacoby Columbia University Press, 2005 211 pp $24.95 FOR MOST OF MY politically conscious life, the idea of social transformation has been the great taboo of American politics...

...Still, the questions are central to any serious discussion of the subject, and it helps that they are framed by a more concrete project: to rescue utopian thought from its murderous reputation as well as from the more mundane charge that it is puritanical and repressive in its penchant for planning out the future to the last detail...

...We want it, but we fear it...

...We might think of iconoclastic utopians as the inverse of canaries in the mine: if they are hearing the sounds of an ineffable redemption, others may already be at work on annoyingly literal blueprints, and still others getting together for as yet obscure political meetings...

...It is not surprising that victims or witnesses of this spectacle would distrust utopians...