As Surrealism turns 100, what can it teach us about the importance of dreaming and creating a better society? Will we wake up from the consumerist dream sold to us by capitalism and how would that change our ideas of utopia?
S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Canada. She is the author of several books, among them Permission, The Eyelid, A Cage for Every Child, and, most recently, Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Culture, Telos, Boundary 2, and The Hedgehog Review. She also coedits the French surrealist review Alcheringa and is curator of the 19th International Exhibition of Surrealism, Marvellous Utopia, which runs from July to September 2024 in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France.
S. D. CHROSTOWSKA
Utopia and the Age of Survival was really an axiological intervention, a reminder of certain values that unite the left. In the book, I focus on two things: Utopia as a myth -- not as a political myth, but as a social myth, in the sense that it goes beyond politics -- and I also communicate my preference for utopias that are not state-based. I use the term “body utopias,” because they’re really anchored in the individual rather than the collective. They arise from individual bodily needs, desires, and how the two interact. From there, they also take into account our individual differences.
Utopias really began as and are anchored in myths; of the golden age, of paradise, and, more recently, of revolution. Utopia is a speculative myth of where society is headed. I think that left-wing thought and socialism -- within which we find anarchism -- can be united around this idea. On the other hand, of course, capitalism also uses utopia, and refers back to ulterior myths to put our critical capacity to sleep. In our capitalistic culture, utopia is used to sell a vision of a better body, a better society, and a better future for the “techno-utopian” crowd. The earlier myth is Thomas More’s city of Utopia; More is the originator of modern Utopianism as we know it, this idea of a utopian island reserved for just some. With my book, I try to take back the term of utopia, and to also rehabilitate a bit this idea of myth, which has been tarnished by 20th century ideologies. I try to do this in order to find the broadest possible common ground for left-wing thinking.
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We as a society have been talking about utopia for a long time, but what does it actually look like to put that into action?
CHROSTOWSKA
I like to think of utopianism as “effective social daydreaming” -- the expression “effective dreaming” comes from Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven. My novella, The Eyelid, is where I first put some of these ideas into images -- ideas which later I developed in Utopia and the Age of Survival. I like the definition of effective social daydreaming because utopia is associated with consciously imagining societies, but I also want to bring daydreaming back to dreaming, because our night dreams are wish fulfillments. In The Eyelid, I explored night dreams and their utopian potential. But going back to effective social daydreaming -- utopian ideas are embodied in our actions. The 19th century French liberal Lamartine said utopias are often only premature truths. Another way of putting it is that what is imaginary tends to become real -- that’s a quote from the founder of Surrealism, André Breton. We daydream of a better world, and this could be a very vague daydream. The idea of utopianism that I'm putting forward in the book is not a detailed, orderly, rational model of the city utopia. It’s this free floating, desirous model of the body utopia, which is unfinished and imperfect. It's always in transformation. These dreams and daydreams that we have are guiding our actions, influencing our day-to-day behavior if we let them. Our imagination is always involved in creating reality. The opposition between the two, reality and the imaginary, is not a stark one; they're porous.
The Techno-utopian Dream of AI
There’s the existing AI and the dream of artificial general intelligence that is aligned with our values and will make our lives better. Certainly, the techno-utopian dream is that it will lead us towards utopia. It is the means of organizing human collectivities, human societies, in a way that would reconcile all the variables, all the things that we can't reconcile because we don't have enough of a fine-grained understanding of how people interact, the different motivations of their psychologies and of societies, of groups of people. Of course, that's another kind of psychology that we're talking about. So I think the dream of AI is a utopian dream that stands correcting, but it is itself being corrected by those who are the curators of that technology. Now you asked me about the changing role of artists in this landscape. I would say, first of all, that I'm for virtuosity. And this makes me think of AI and a higher level AI, it would be virtuous before it becomes super intelligence.
Surrealism as a Framework for Utopia
In recent years, I’ve turned to Surrealism. I found in it something like a mirror of aspects of my sensibility, and a history with which I remain in dialogue. Most people mistake Surrealism for an aesthetic movement, but Surrealism's emphasis is on the unconscious workings of thought. I find it a very important piece of the puzzle of what attitude we should take in order to live in a more “utopianizing” fashion, as I call it in my book. We can daydream of a better society, one that includes not just us or our family, but everyone, because a utopia worthy of the name today is universal, it's all-inclusive. So surrealism is not just an aesthetics, it's also an ethics, and that ethics is utopian. It's an impulse to refashion one’s life, to create a world, and to transform the world into a desirable one. We want the imagination to be empowered. I talk about Surrealism in the book, but it has since taken on even greater importance in my day to day life. I am actively involved in the French Surrealist Movement in an effort to keep it alive, and to remind the public that it is still very much an international movement staying true to its principles. I've co-curated a major exhibition of Surrealism, reflecting on the 100 years since the Manifesto of Surrealism, so I'm very much in this moment where I'm trying to explain to the public the value of this movement.
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Tell us a little bit about your upbringing in Poland at the end of the Cold War, and how that shaped your visions of utopia in the modern age.
CHROSTOWSKA
I grew up in Poland in the 80s and the very early 90s. I left when I was 19, and I also spent a couple of years in the States. As a child and adolescent, I had a taste of both worlds; I experienced the cultural contrast between the West and the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. I was in the US when Chernobyl happened, and the West left an indelible impression on me. I was first amazed by the sheer abundance of commodity culture; that constant stimulation of the desire for the bigger and the better contributed in more ways than I can even name to the education of my sensibility. There also was the freedom of expression that, even though I was very young, I felt to be different from what I was used to in Poland. This was a brief period [of my life], but it was very important. And then, in 1989, we had the first parliamentary elections in Poland, and we were the first country to do so in the Eastern Bloc. It was the end of the so-called communist era, and my family rejoiced because they supported the Solidarity movement and they distributed samizdat literature. My aunt was a librarian, and she would show me this clandestine literature. I understood the fear of surveillance, the regime of fear that the adults around me lived through, and the breath of fresh air when the elections happened and the transition began. And in 1990, my father took me to Berlin, and this was as the Wall was coming down, demolished with bulldozers and hammers and pickaxes by ordinary people in the street. I thought this was very symbolic. Witnessing these two very rapid transitions made me think that change, even in apparently prohibitive circumstances, remained a real possibility. Maybe that's what made me a natural candidate for utopian thinking, for embracing utopian thought.
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How do you reconcile visions of utopia with living in harmony with our planet, especially considering that the concept of utopia implies a man-made design or a return to an original equilibrium with a pristine nature that may no longer exist?
CHROSTOWSKA
I think that we should not be under any illusion that we can return to some pristine Earth. We have to do the best we can with the Earth that we have inherited for our generation and for those of our children, but we should not, therefore, say, well, it's all lost. Species are becoming extinct as never before. We should not become pessimists because there is no other alternative, because we've been robbed of this idea of pristine nature.
I think nature has not been pristine. People speak about the Anthropocene. I don't quite like this term, but the idea that humans have been transforming nature and have been altering it, adulterating it, something to put into perspective this nostalgia for pristine nature. And utopianism actually goes hand in hand with nostalgia, in the sense that nostalgic longings have long fed into utopian imaginaries, right? I mentioned the myth of the Golden Age. This was something that used to exist, the Golden Age, right? Or paradise, an idea of nature, again, pure nature in harmony with human beings. These nostalgic imaginaries that feed into and can reactivate utopian thinking in our day. We should by no means let go of an idea of pristine nature. And I also don't think – just to return to this idea of species extinction – I don't think that the de-extinction efforts are particularly utopian, even though they may seem this way. How do we compensate for the material loss of biodiversity? I think no amount of technological ingenuity will actually fulfill this desire for a return to the pristine nature that we have lost.
Reflections for the Next Generation
I'd like young people not to limit their world to content they can find on the internet. I think that's a real danger. Many of my students say, “well, I haven't thought about this. I haven't read this because I didn't find it online for free.” I want them to remember that not all knowledge is digitized, that much remains elusive to the nets of the internet even in its effort to make knowledge accessible on one platform, to create this kind of enormous encyclopedia. And in this quest, we also reduce the past to the present. The past is more virtually present in our lives than for any other generation, because it's available online in the form of textual and audiovisual archives. This proximity actually affects the past's pastness. The appearance of distance is lost in the digital reproduction, whether it's paintings, or archival documents, or photographs. I think it's erroneous to think that everything that is extant from the past is at our fingertips and that we don't have to go out and look for it. So what I would like to pass on is curiosity; curiosity about the past shouldn't stop at the digital. It's tempting to think that all the answers are already there online because it's so vast, this web we are spinning, but that’s not the case.
