Peter Marcuse is noted for having championed a leftist political ideology throughout his career as a professor of urban planning, even as many academics abandoned Marxism. It was none the less surprising however, when Peter began the lecture by boldly proclaiming that America was entering a Utopian Age, a Utopia of Goldman Sachs and Hank Paulson. While Marcuse’s message of corporate excess was provocative, his reasoning on the subject was shaky at best. He spoke of the treasury being “privatized”, but in reality, it was banks that were seized by the state. In the wake of the financial upheavals of the last few months, arguments against the free market are increasingly irrelevant, because the free market has been replaced by state intervention on an unprecedented scale. How ironic, that it is the very state involvement that the left desires which is causing the critical elements which Marcuse himself decries. “It is the small firms that will be eaten by the large ones” he worries. He is right, of course, as the beneficiaries of the corporate bailout used the money not to make loans, but to buy up their competitors. It is the reality of the evils of government under the guise of public service which time and again disprove the eloquent proclamations of the Left.
Once he steps away from the political propaganda, I appreciate his philosophical perspectives. He makes the point that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. In our class on Participatory Networks, we talked about the grandiose vision of urban perfection as outlined by le Corbusier, and how it was ultimately an oppressive subversion of human freedom and the individual. Marcuse seemed cautious of utopias, perhaps because of his family’s history dealing with Nazi Germany. Had he focused exclusively on the evils of utopia, rather than ranting about the ills of corporations, (which was an underhanded endorsement of his own utopia) I might have given his argument more credibility.
Pia Maria Ahlback, on the other hand, spoke lucidly, though hoarsely, about the concept of heterotopias and utopias. She posed the question, in the context of a newly purchased handbag, can anything be a utopia? or What are the limits of Utopia? Like Marcuse, she is suspicious of the giant corporation, but she approaches her example of Monsanto by grounding it in a literary context of Thomas Moore and Foucault which is cautiously critical rather than hyperbolically damning. She argues that dystopias and heterotopias may reveal a suppressed utopia which is an inversion of the hegemonic powers which define utopia. Her perspective opens the possibility for good to emerge from a wide variety of places and spaces. What I find so appealing about her argument is the way in which it implies that the more dystopic things appear to be, the more opportunities for diversity and change emerge. She seems to encourage a vision of diversity; a quality notably lacking in the black and white dichotomy of Peter Marcuse. One person’s perfect is another person’s prison; in heterotopias, at least there is space among the chaos for change.
