Between light and darkness: Earthsea and the name of utopia

In Le Guin's Earthsea Quartet, knowledge of the name of a thing or person guarantees control over their destiny. In a world where light and darkness co-exist and where dragons are an extension of humans, a name is the means with which one can achieve one's vision of the world. If utopia is the individual projection of a supposedly collective ideal, then knowledge of names is the vehicle for the realization of one's own utopia, which may well come into conflict with the utopias of others. However, Earthsea is not simply a series of battles between individual utopists. Earthsea itself constitutes a precarious and non-traditional utopia, where antithetical sides co-exist and neither prevails forever. As its name denotes, “earth” and “sea,” darkness and light, tombs and open seas, tiny islands and eternal journeys operate together to produce the setting for the novels and enable the chase of an ever-elusive knowledge. For as the utopists in Earthsea find out, knowledge can only be complete if it also comprises its Jungian opposite, namely ignorance. In an attempt to explore the relation between utopia, knowledge, and ignorance, this article employs psychology and linguistics, and constructs a description of a “just” world which remains necessarily utopian.

Utopia and its Discontents: Dreams of Catastrophe and the End of 'the End of History'

The institutionalization of Utopia Studies in the last decade is premised upon a specifically aesthetic reception of Ernst Bloch’s theory of the “utopian impulse” during the 1980s and 1990s. A postmodern uneasiness to both left and right formulations of the "End of History" during this period imposes a resistance to concepts of historical and political closure or totality, resulting in a "Utopianism without Utopia". For all the attractiveness of this pan-utopianism, its failure to consider the relation between historical representation and fulfillment renders it consummate with liberalism as a merely inverted conservatism. In contrast to this specific recuperation of a Bloch, the continuing importance of Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image and the speculative concept of historical experience which underlies it becomes apparent. The intrusion of the historical Absolute is coded throughout Benjamin’s thought as the eruptive and mortuary figure of catastrophe, which stands as the dialectical counterpart to the utopian wish images of the collective dream. Indeed, the motto under which the Arcades Project was to be constructed derives from Adorno: “Each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophe”.