Steve Mentz

Ortelius’s map of Utopia (via theopenutopia.org)

What if we build it and leave the door open? Will everybody come inside?

That’s the gambit of Stephen Duncombe’s new site, The Open Utopia, and somewhat also a motto for these first few weeks of my current grad class. Last week’s question was, what does Utopia have to do with globalization? The class is built around three imaginary places — Utopia, Faerie Land, and  Paradise — and we aim to mash these literary archetypes up against the massive surge of information, maps, first-hand accounts, misrepresentations, propaganda, and assorted other fictions that maritime voyages brough back to Europe in the early modern period. Reading assorted bits from Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1598-1600) alongside More, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, and others helps recall that geography always appears alongside and entangled with fantasy.

Two quick thoughts this week:

1. Globalization needs utopia, especially in our catastrophe-driven era, because we need to remember our duty to futurity. Not just in a hope-and-change progressive way, but as a pressure, force, and burdon. It’s there, waiting for us, and we can’t not travel forward, even though it’s not an easy road. If it’s a direction, it’s also a fantasy about a wiser past or less brutal future.

2. Ecologically speaking, I’m struck on this reading by how much More emphasizes the relative dearth of natural resources in Utopia — little iron, relatively infertile soil, no gold or gems (which the Utopians despise anyway). Is the beautiful place / no place also already depleted? Human capital, used and shared, makes up for this lack, but as we contemplate the scarcity of natural resources in the 21c and impending struggles over arable land, fresh water, oil, and other commodities, perhaps we can find in More a way to think about adaptation?

I’m also enjoying the prospect of Richard Hakluyt, a later-generation humanist clergyman, engaging in dialogue with More’s Utopian table talk. From humanist skepticism to expansionist boosterism, in just a few generations!

Here’s Hakluyt, on how he came to write his book of maritime histories:

 …it was my hap to visit the chamber of Mr. Richard Hakluyt my cousin, a gentleman of the Middle Temple, well known unto you, at a time when I found lying open upon his board certain books of Cosmography, with a Universal Map: he seeing me somewhat curious in the view thereof, began to instruct my ignorance, by showing me the division of the earth unto three parts after the old account: he pointed with his wand to all the known seas, gulfs, bays, straits, capes, rivers, empires, kingdoms, dukedoms and territories of each part, with declaration also of their special commodities, and particular wants, which by the benefit of traffic, and the intercourse of merchants, are plentifully supplied (Epistle Dedicatory to the first ed. 1589).

 

Some interesting discussion in class last night about the different contexts of the terms anthropocene and homogenocene.

For anthropocene, which seems to be a fast-becoming the default term — see Timothy Morton’s blog — we poked around on a spiffy new website and talked about what happens when you keep “anthropos” at the center of things, even as villain rather than hero. If the big story of the 21c is anthropic climate change, driven by the carbon we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere since the early industrial period (or long before, as some argue), then that’s still a human-centered world picture, a planet built, or in this case trashed, by us. It’s a different story from the civilizing mission of colonialism, but the central actor remains essentially the same.

The homogenocene, by contrast, isn’t about people. If the big story — I adapt this argument from Charles Mann’s 1493 — is about the homogenization of biological life after the physical reintegration of the once-isolated ecosystems of the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa after the late 15c, that’s a different story. Human beings are still instigators, even infamous characters like Columbus, Cortez, Pizzarro, and the others. But the key actors in this story aren’t just admirals or conquistadors; they also include mosquitos  tobacco, viruses, plant and animal species such as potatoes, tomatoes,, and other things. (If I were rewriting the story I’d emphasis ocean currents and wind patterns — but that’s the sort of salty stuff I like.)

The homogenocene seems the more neutral term, and certainly it exerts less political pressure on the present. But I wonder if it’s not the more complex and problematic way to understand globalization and perhaps even modernity. A process of mixing, of bringing together things — people, plants, animals, viruses, insects — that were once mostly separate. It’s not a peaceful process at all, as the uncountable deaths of native Americans to European and African diseases shows most drastically. But even if humans perhaps started it, it’s pretty clearly outside of human hands now, and has been for a long time.

Mann’s version of this eco-story does something interesting to figures like Columbus and Cortes. They certainly aren’t the heroes of 19c histories, but they also aren’t purely colonialist villains. In some ways they seem like fools, ineffectual and not in control for all of their massive ambition and the world-changing consequences of their lives.

I suppose the homogenocene tells a posthuman variation on the eco-story.