Pandemic Again Giving Rise to Utopian Ideas, Russian Culturalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 29 – In the past, wars and pandemics have often given rise to utopian ideas, as people face disaster and, often with their ordinary lives completely disrupted, considered what a different and ideal world might look like, Irina Kaspe of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics says. The coronavirus pandemic of today is doing the same thing.

            When people are suffering from pestilence and plague, she says, they often say they are living “inside an anti-utopia,” the very idea of which prompts them to think about what a utopia would be like, with some imagining a world so controlled that these tragedies can be avoided and others one in which they would not arise (iq.hse.ru/news/376188536.html).

            A striking feature of the current pandemic as has been the case with similar plagues in the past, Kaspe says, is that it has simultaneously led people to focus ever more narrowly on themselves and those closest to them and to think more globally than they were accustomed to doing before the spread of the disease.

            That has led some Russian observers, following the observations  in Michel Foucault’s 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, to think first and foremost about how the authorities are using the pandemic to tighten their control and even to speculate that the powers that be invented or at least exploited the disease to their own ends. 

            In Foucault’s telling, a pandemic embodies “chaos and disorder” and leads people to want order above all, something that the powers that be can exploit to establish “unlimited power over the bodies of their subjects, ‘a utopia of the perfectly administered city,’” to use the French philosopher’s words.

            But other developments in Russian thinking during the pandemic reflect a different understanding, one that was earlier descriped by American scholar Rebecca Totaro in her book, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (Pittsburgh, 2005).

            According to Totaro, these writers understood that no utopian space could exist but that a focus on the models they suggest “does not have anything in common with escapism.” Instead, it represents a means of thinking about how to overcome the threats a virus presents and may empower society as well as the state.

            As with Foucault, so too with Totaro, Kaspe says, “we encounter here the idea of total control” needed to cleanse the city of chaos.  “But if Fouceault understands control exclusively as a form of political supervision, Totaro allows us to see other possible, in essence, existential, dimensions of control.”

            “By cleansing the meaning space of all that is disordered, illogical, irrational, and senseless,” the Moscow scholar continues, “the utopians are trying to establish control not only over a mortal illness but in the final analysis over death itself.”  Such ideas can be seen in the works of H.G. Wells and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

           

            What this leads to, Kaspe continues, is the idea of utopia as a world “free from us, a world in which there is no one left to be infected by viruses.”  And in a metaphorical way, that leads some to call for cleansing society of what are metaphorical viruses, “internal enemies” who are spreading a virus of their own kind.

            Such attitudes can be used not only by the state but by society against the state. And the Moscow cultural specialist points to the arguments of radical British geographer David Harvey who suggests that utopian ideas can energize the masses and lead them to demand the return to them of control over public space.