Jacoby, Picture Imperfect (i) (2005)

Preface and Chapter 1

Jacoby, like many utopian scholars, attempts to distinguish two versions of utopia. He calls the two currents of utopian thought, the 'blue print tradition' and the 'iconoclastic tradition' (xiv). They are distinguishable in that the blue print tradition is content-driven, outlining what utopia might/should look like, down to small details such as eating etiquette, dress, etc. He wants to distance his project from this rigid understanding of utopia and instead embrace those iconoclastic utopians, 'those who dreamt of a superior society but who declined to give its precise measurements' (xv). In this sense he alligns himself with Bloch, in that he is more interested in a utopian impulse or spirit.

Jacoby sets out to attempt to explain why he thinks 'the utopian vision has flagged' through a three part hyphothesis: the collapse of communism, the assumed connection between utopians and totalitarians, and an impoverished Western imagination (5). While pointing to his inability to add much to the fall of communism other than to suggest a wholesale rejection of all thinking connected to communism need not be thrown out tout court, Jacoby's main concerns is to splinter utopia from its connotation as necessarily totalitarian or, in other words, as a path to dystopia. He argues that utopia/dystopia is a false dichotomy, pointing to how dystopia has been seen as the necessary outcome of utopia, thereby emptying utopia itself. He provides a rich review of the most famous dystopian novels (1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World) to argue for their critiques of totalitarianism, rather than utopia. He further traces through the many publications, mostly focused on Nazism and genocide, that take utopia and totalitarianism to be necessarily yoked together. Jacoby argues that it is not utopian designs that lead to war, violence, and genocide but rather ethnic, religious, or nationalist agendas. Second, Jacoby argues that the position of imagination in both utopia and totalitarianism further cleaves them from one another. While imagination is integral to utopia, it threatens totalitarianism. However, Jacoby diagnoses a contemporary impoverishment of imagination. His concept of imagination links it to childhood, a space which he argues sustains imagination. He points to contemporary childhood as being 'colonized' by television, boredom, and the toy market which has created 'less inclination - and perhaps fewer resources - for utopian dreaming' (30).

Jacoby wants to insist on moving away from blue print utopias: 'The blueprints not only appear repressive, they also rapidly become outdated' (32). I think this part is interesting because it belies his belief in a universal tradition, like Bloch. He also emphasizes that the iconoclastic utopians held on to what could potentially be categorized as utopian affects: 'harmony, leisure, peace, and pleasure' (33). He is also keen to suggest that the Jewishness of these iconoclastic utopians may have something to do with their refusal of images, their resistance to drawing out their utopias. Further, he remarks that the refusal to sketch out utopia 'refuses to reduce the unknown future to the well-known present, the hope to its cause' (36). He wants to insist on utopia as no-place and I am wary of this tendency to agree with a universal utopian tendency that manages to free itself from particular presents.