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Victorian Urban Governance and Modern Cosmopolitan Imaginary:
H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia
We build now not citadels, but ships of state.
A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells
Concomitant with the ascendance of neoliberal globalization at the turn of the
twenty-first century is a surge of cosmopolitanism as a point of exigent attention.
While cosmopolitanism is often taken up as an ideal rather than an artificial product
of long social changes,in this article I would like to sketch a historical manifestation
of what I venture to call “cosmopolitan imaginary” at the turn of the twentieth century
in England. I adopt this term to trace a realm not completely covered either by the
history of intellectual ideas or by the history of literature to emphasize, on the one
hand, a common vision of seeing the world in the city can be manifest in different
forms of cultural expressions and, on the other hand, cosmopolitan yearning sits
between accepted traditions of genres and historical tendencies.1
The very beginning of the twentieth century is a key historical site where we
could examine the making of early varieties of liberal cosmopolitan imaginary.
Historically, it is a period of globalization too. Jeffry A. Friedenin in his history of
global capitalism surveys how between 1896 and 1914 an “integrated international
economy” at its core came close to the classical ideal of global free trade (6). The
steamships and railroads gradually incorporated the geographical earth into
transportation grids and world trade accelerated accordingly, from “under $8 billion in
1898 to over $18 billion in 1913” (19). What anchored the acceleration of
international trading was the gold standard, inaugurated in 1844 by Bank of England
1
Here I follow largely the definition of social imaginary provided by Charles Taylor. Please see his
and gradually received an almost world-wide acceptance, with the exception of only
China and Persia in 1908 (17). Open trade was considered the norm of the day by
such major industrial countries as Great Britain, France, Germany and the United
States. In this newly formed world order Great Britain was central, investing half of
her capital abroad and accounting for “about one-third of all international trade” (47).
The dominance of Great Britain’s capital incites a corresponding imaginary of
expanding Victorian success to a global scale. To highlight the significance of this
inquiry, I commence with H. Rider Haggard’s observation of adventure romance, a
form that often orientalizes the globe for the metropolitan gaze. In 1894, he wondered,
where "will the romance writers of future generations find a safe and secret place,
unknown to the pestilent accuracy of the geographer, in which to lay their plots?" (qtd.
in McClure 11) This archetypal adventure writer of England lamented the
disappearing conditions that make possible adventure romance because cartographers
on the ride of imperial expansion had practically mapped the surface of the globe
toward the end of the Victorian era. Parallel to the decline of adventure fantasy,
however, this study pinpoints around the turn of the twentieth century the rise of
another kind of dreaming of the world, not necessarily revealed merely in form of
popular literature but cutting across different forms of representation,2 which in effect
opens up the city and converts the urban space into a site of endless reshaping and one
of human future. I will soon explain how this kind of cosmopolitan imaginary
translates Victorian politics of demos and urbanization discourse onto the global space
at the turn of the twentieth century to bring into being a mutual reinforcement of
urban governance and imagined globalism. I will employ H. G. Wells as an exemplary
2
Patrick Geddes expressed cosmopolitan imaginary in his exhibition plans, among which the Outlook Tower museum is the most studied by contemporary scholars. Please see Helen Elizabeth Meller’s
to explain how the novelist articulates cosmopolitan imaginary of his day in his A
Modern Utopia to “map” vital connections of modern urban globalism and the
city-making of the nineteenth century. I will float the suggestion the cosmopolitan
imaginary unearthed therewith would be of great relevance to understanding
contemporary globalism today.
I: Urban Prosperity in the Late Victorian England
To situate H. G. Wells’ utopia of a world state in the Victorian history of
urbanization, rather than read it as sui generis, I will first briefly cover some historical
contexts of Victorian urbanization. One underlying cause of Victorian urban
prosperity, in addition to such well documented factors as the changed means of
production, colonial expansion, globalized exchanges of commerce, is a rapid
improvement of urban management of the lived environment and population. While
Victorian urbanization indeed is a complex issue, a Foucauldian reading in particular
provides a great vista into this problematic. Several Foucauldian scholars launched a
revision of Victorian historical studies in the 1990s. Dean Mitchell first employs the
Foucauldian concept of governmentality to interpret the social effects of the New
Poor Law administration and thus underscores both the technical and the social
dimensions in techniques of government. Mary Poovey codifies what Mitchell singles
out in the term of the social body, an imaginary object which proposals and
implementation of apparatuses delimit and work on. Nikolas Rose and Thomas
Osborne identify the city as the privileged space for the ongoing governmentality
highlighted by Mitchell and Poovey. The major practices found in the history of
Victorian urban development are, in Patrick Joyce’s words, “the conditions of
possibility of liberalism, or in a stronger sense, as themselves liberal infrastructure,
with nineteenth-century infrastructure being in this sense political infrastructure” (70).
and the making of subjects in the conditions of governing technologies.3 As a result,
redefining the Victorian city as a space for self-regulated individuality rather than a
site of surveillance, these Foucauldian scholars render visible the building of the
Victorian city as on-going attempts at administration/material “infrastructures,” such
as work houses and sewages, to allow for self-discipline of urbanites. Freedom, in this
sense, is not a willed act of doing as one likes, but a practice socially sanctioned by
and prospering in a design of a municipal city.
Here I give a brief account of a prominent case for illustration, the enforcement
of the New Poor Law.4 5 By 1830 the money paid for poor relief assumed one-fifth
of the national expenditure in Britain (Englander 3). Robert Malthus’s theory of
reproductive competition allowed one to draw a miserable conclusion that Britain was
at the risk of being consumed away by an increasing burden of a population who were
idle. Reformers concentrated on the question of how to keep the able-bodied from
wasting funds of poverty relief. Edwin Chadwick and others promoted the practice of
workhouses to deter those who sought aids. Once admitted into the workhouse, the
person would subject him/herself to a rigid regimen of labor in an extremely harsh
living condition and the sexes were separated inside. The moral legitimacy of this
establishment was to prevent the able-bodied from degenerating into socially
dependent paupers. Yet an obvious economic reason was to reduce the increasing
relief rate collected from urban well-to-dos. The implementation of the New Poor
3
Please see Patrick Joyce on statistics (20-61) and Pamila Gilbert’s Mapping the Victorian Social Body on mapping.
4
This is an often rehearsed portion of Victorian history. For an account of it, please read David Englander’s Poverty and Poor Law Reform and Lynn Hollen Lees’s The Solidarities of Strangers. 5
One should be reminded that this is just one among many others to come, including the Sanitary Movement, the making of public libraries, the elimination of slaughtering the live stock, and the much discussed establishment of lighted streets.Christopher Hamlin offers a comprehensive account of the emergence of public health in the Sanitary Movement. Chris Otter discusses how light in the city shaped urban subjects. Patrick Joyce also discusses the removal of slaughter houses and cattle markets from the city and the designing of local libraries for public access.
Law6 managed to keep some urban problems under a bearable check but still one sees
in this case much is at stake. First of all, the urban authorities refrained themselves
from intervening in the labor market by artificially posing a standard of living, and
returned the able-bodied back to the labor market for low wages..Second, in its
practice one finds the triumph of free market in the sense that social relief was kept to
a minimum to allow the manufacturers to collectively minimize labor wages without
being responsible for social consequences of appalling working conditions,
overcrowded living space and deteriorating health. Thus, it forged a format of
governmentality in which the rulers were made into resources managers and the ruled
self-governing“liberal subjects.”
The theoretical concept of technologies of governance allows one to explain how
the Victorian city weaved different kinds of social relationships in one ensemble of
governing systems, machineries, organizations and so on and additionally opens up
inquiries not yet well explored, and among which the human resources that make
possible the operation of governing apparatuses have direct bearing on the making of
modern cosmopolitan imaginary.7 Interestingly, the intervention by urban
management created a paradox: social reality is at once determined by place and
amenable to social programs. The shape of the city is determined by the social milieu
but technologies of governance can instead reengineer the conditions of the social
milieu, which in turn disrupt the determinism of place. Such a paradox then forms a
condition that enlarged the role of intellectuals in this circuit of urban changes for
6
One must not think the historical project of liberal governance was complete. Mary Poovey rightly cautions the reader that it was in “the process of forming,” and “never fully formed” (1).
7
Another one, not directly relevant to the argument here, is that material resources are unavoidably required to keep technologies operative even if the technologies involved are not directly constructed on materials such as in the instance of the New Poor Law. Chris Otter makes a great case on the necessity of materials and maintenance that make lighting of the city streets “durable.” His
investigation points to the fact that behind the booming of urban governing technologies lies an often ignored factor of wealth in the Victorian city. Any progress the Victorian city made assumes the incredible wealth but such a presupposition is not directly transparent.
they were in the position of designing and executing the social programs of urban
governance. The creative potentials of human resources can always make
technologies all the more elastic so as to be adaptable to contrived objectives. If we
consider how Victorian urban governance in due course encouraged social planning
by intellectuals, it is not hard to understand the social trend in which intellectuals tried
to take the place of owners of property to be managers or trustees of social
development. Foucauldian inquiries, focusing on how subjects are structured, are
disposed to suspend this question of agency. Here it is instructive to go to the social
history of British modernity narrativized by Harold Perkin to realize that the dominant
success of technologies exclusively for the sake of free market is temporary at best.
Professionals who lent a hand to the construction of social reforms were largely
indiscernible in the midst of the triumph of the social projects at first (Origins of
Modern English Society 252-270), but they returned with a vengeance between 1880
and 1914 (The Rise of Professional Society 116-170). Perkin observes in this period
intellectuals of different backgrounds were mindful of their active engagement in the
management of the society in general. In this sense, to explain such mounting
awareness of agency among intellectuals, one cannot limit himself to the Foucauldian
paradigm and bypass another inquiry on Victorian liberalism which lays emphasis on
cultivation of an individual as an agent of social action.8
II Articulating Classical Globalization beyond Realism: H. G. Wells’s A Modern
Utopia
After two sociological works on the global future, Anticipations (1902) and
Mankind in the Making (1903), Wells wrote A Modern Utopia (1905), which Lewis
8
Amada Anderson expounds how Victorians including Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde seek to cultivate the ideal of detachment. David Wayne Thomas argues that “the aspiration to many-sidedness,” or a valued practice to reach an autonomous decision in response to multiple restraints of a given situation, is the ideal of cultivation for Victorians (26).
Mumford famously regards as “the quintessential utopia” (184). Reading against the
grain, assuming A Modern Utopia not just as an idealized future but also a
manifestation of the present in a fundamental sense, I follow mainly Fredric Jameson
and Walter Benjamin in understanding utopia as constitutive of modernity, a fantasy
coexisting with the urban concentration of commodities,9 and argue that he takes
advantage of the utopian writing to form an imaginary of a globalized society at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Simply put, the utopian future is a historical sense
lodged into the present experience of modernity. In examining how the imaginative or
the literary dimension of A Modern Utopia vocalizes a version of modern globalism,
we will see how he solidifies a global imaginary of abstract expansion that
paradoxically sits with the urban reality of jam-packed materials and commodities.
Upon writing A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells set out to accommodate contesting
perspectives of what the world should be, and resolved on a form manifestly
novelistic, plotting an unexpected journey of the Owner of the Voice and the Botanist,
two characters of distinctly different minds. This book unfolds as a stage exhibition,
monitored by a chairperson. A presenter, vigorously denied to be the author, said to be
the Owner of the Voice, reads from a manuscript. Along with the major presenter is
another character “the Botanist,” who tags alone in the journey to an advanced world
in spite of his own preoccupation with an unrequited love affair. In the background
the utopia is projected in “the image of a cinematograph entertainment” (3). Glitches
of the projection may cut in and the presentation alternates between blurred images
and focused pictures. When the story begins, the two characters are “transported” into
a world identical in its geographical and urban layouts with the Earth: “And behold!
9
Benjamin’s theory of urban fantasmogoria is well known. Here is the complex way Jameson constructs utopia, which is “neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective. (Jameson 284)
In the twinkling of an eye we are in that other world!” (14).
When it was published in 1905, literary luminaries such as Henry James and
Joseph Conrad were effusive in their praise for the immense capacity of the Wellsian
imagination (Hillegas viii). Bound up with Wells’s later propagandization of the world
government, however, this book soon fell out of favor in the aftermath of the WWII. A
typical voice against this work, represented by George Orwell, was a deep suspicion
that it might proselytize a centralized world state with severely limited freedom in
store for individuals. Continued interests in this book were sporadic and first and
foremost derived from an appreciation of Wells’s place in the modern intellectual
history. The major one is, in the midst of nationalist fervor, Warren Wager defense of
Wells’s cosmopolitanism. Recently, we see a minor rise of attention to this book,
especially in its “hybrid” form of presentation. A Modern Utopia is indeed
unconventional in its form of presentation, which, Wells states, is a product of “trial
and deliberation” (xxxii). Its form poses a challenge to literary criticism, not only
because it mixes fictional writing and argumentation, but because within the fictional
story one finds points of incoherence. June Deery explores the multiple meanings of
the word “progress” to call attention to the fact that this work deals more than social
progress: it is a work that reveals itself “in the process of being written” (217). Some
others see this hybrid form a sign of Wells’s creativity. Patrick Parrinder reaffirms the
earliest critical response and maintains that “it is for its textual and imaginative
qualities, rather than for its ideas, that the book repays rereading” (116).10 Harvey N.
Quamen observes literary critics are hampered by a crude classification system
borrowed from biology and evolution of the late Victorian era and fail to appreciate
Wells’s experiment on literary genres but he values Wells’s experimentation for its
10
Parrinder, Patrick. “Utopia and Meta-Utopia in H. G. Wells.” Science-Fiction Studies 12 (1985): 115-28.
potential contribution to the study of literary history in the way of how one should
stress elastic boundaries of a genre.
This brief overview of critical responses allows us to find the reading of A
Modern Utopia divided between the disciplines of intellectual history and literary
studies.I would instead seek to explain how it is necessary to place Wells’s ideas and
his form of writing side by side in our reading and how the form of the work itself is
connected to the construction of a Wellsian utopia. To convince the audience that
social reality is indeed fluid, subject to change and may reach its optimal condition if
the humankind all work toward this direction, one needs not just a global history, but
a new form of persuasion. Lauren Goodlad is right to observe a close affinity between
Wells and aestheticism of the late Victorian era and considers him a “quasi-Idealist”
(219). I would like to extend Goodlad’s insight by placing A Modern Utopia in the
historical context of its urban governance to examines how Wells deals with crisis of
representation in its narrow sense or how to articulate globalism without adequate
forms of writing available.11
In other words, to write about large-scale changes of the social milieu for a
writer at the end of the Victorian age is to face squarely the question of how not to
write in the manner of realism, a form that vehemently presupposes an unchanged
milieu. To make my point, I revisit first the finale of A Modern Utopia. The Owner of
the Voice is unexpectedly wrenched awake from his utopian dream, and acutely
overwhelmed by sullied streets, bums and a prostitute: “the dirt-littered basin of the
fountain,” “tramps,” and “a draggled prostitute” (360; 362). While the details of urban
reality are unbearably clear and real in a sense, he regretfully bellows at the ongoing
of crowds and city traffic: “I wish . . . I could smash the world of everyday”
11
Please read Chapter 16 of The Condition of Postmodernity byDavid Harvey for a close analysis of crisis of representation in the nineteenth century literature
(emphasis original 363). And he yells again: “This is a dream too—this world” (363).
In fact, we may privilege this scene as symbolic of the conception moment of Wells’s
utopian project although this howl for change is located at the end of the plot. The
reversal of reality into dream and vice versa is here presented as the urgent task, to
which the whole book is indeed constructed so as to respond in the form of “an
illumination that passes as it comes” (373). Wells recognizes the obstacle to a
perception of social evolution is the immediate context of urban life, beyond which
the reader must be led to proceed. Significantly, to write a picture of social change at
the turn of the twentieth century is also, to write against realism, a form that
legitimizes urban reality by its relentless presentation of unchanged “thingness” in the
environment.12 What is noteworthy then is how Wells would break open the
confinement of realism to render the city open for reshaping and transforming into the
very site of articulation of fantasy. Wittingly or not, he seeks a form that defies
realism, more on the change of the milieu than on that of an individual.13
In A Modern Utopia, Wells envisions a world state sharply distinguished from
past utopias by its characteristic of being “kinetic”: “But the Modern Utopia must be
not static but kinetic, must shape not a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading
to a long ascent of stages” (5). Critics have paid attention to the keyword “kinetic.”
For example, Parrington glosses this word by identifying it as an instance of ethical
evolution in the sense as Thomas Huxley sees it (98). However, to my knowledge, its
meanings, of great consequence to understanding both the form and the content of this
work, have not been thoroughly traced. Importantly, being kinetic has both temporal
12
In this case, we may go to Peter Brooks for his pithy acumen regarding the sociological significance of realism: “Realism is nothing if not urban: it is most characteristically about the city in some
important way, as the new total context of modern life” (131). 13
Even though Quamen defends him for doing an experiment. I would say that Wells does not completely understand that his major target would be realism since he still tries his hands on realist novels after this book, including Tono-Bungay.
and spatial connotations. First of all, its temporal association is derived from
positivism. Auguste Comte counter-distinguishes “social statics,” a stable moral order,
from “social dynamics” to underscore “the uneven forces and disparate events that
characterized human progress” (Cowen and Shenton 29). Typifying this new world as
“kinetic,” Wells simply reaffirms Comte’s emphasis on “change and development” (A
Modern Utopia 5). Second, being kinetic suggests the spatial meaning of a world of
global flows of people and things. Interestingly, the two meanings of being kinetic,
conceived together, are very close to “time-space compression,” a dominant meaning
of globalization nowadays.14 Such a characteristic presents a challenge to Wells in
terms of the form of his writing. The author’s vision begs the question of what it takes
to write a “kinetic” utopia. How could one explain the complex process of settling
down the final form after giving up several other possibilities, and what does this
struggle for articulation mean beyond his personal career of writing and politics,
given the height of classical globalization at the early twentieth century?
The following discussion is broken into two parts: one on how Wells creates a
form and the other on what content is supported by the given form.
1. Aesthetic Imagination and the Formation of Wellsian Cosmopolitan
Imaginary
Wells constructs cosmopolitan imaginary by appealing to aestheticism. By and
large, he privileges aesthetic imagination in his social planning. In a lecture six years
after the publication of A Modern Utopia, he valorizes literary education in the
training of future officials.
We must have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations, vanities,
abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its dreams, its sense of constructive
14
David Harvey defines time-space compression: “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240).
order, its consolations, its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions . . .
the complicated social organization today cannot get along without the
amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation such a range of
characterization in our novels implies. (151)15
One might perceive that the emphasis on novel is not for its verisimilitude but for its
faculty to inspire ethical understanding with imaginative stories. A similar
constellation of concerns of novel, politics and imagination dominates the making of
A Modern Utopia. Like many Victorian predecessors including the eminent social
sage Matthew Arnold, Wells is driven by aestheticization of Friedrich Schiller in the
way of conceiving of social evolution. Here I only briefly summarizes some aspects
of Schiller’s theory that have direct relevance to our understanding of the form of A
Modern Utopia.
Partly as a response to the terror of social fragmentation and the violence of
regicide, Friedrich Schiller wrote On the Aesthetic Education of Man to dispel the fear
of the demos.16 It begins with the problematic of conflict between the needs of an
individual and those of a society in general. Any individual seems at first to be
governed by the conflict between what he calls “sensuous drive,” including sensory
experiences, basic needs of survival and emotional impulses, and “formal drive,” the
process of experiences into rational standards. Schiller thinks it is only seemingly so
and these two can be synthesized into a “play drive,” a disinterested activity for its
own sake. Schiller provides a psychology of aesthetic elevation. This activity
possesses both content of life, as from sense-drive, and form, as from form-drive, and
constitutes a living form. This aesthetic activity is then full of social significance to
15
Wells, H. G. “The Contemporary Novel.” Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray. London: Hart-Davis, 1958,. 131-55.
16
In the eighth chapter, he comments on the approaching chaos in the hands of the revolutionary crowd in France.
Schiller, and means detachment from immediate reality but toward the mutually
beneficial relationship between an individual and the collective. In this way, the
play-drive becomes “aesthetic semblance,” or crudely put, detached aesthetic
imagination that hovers a bit away from the immediate reality but “imitate” in
imagination of beauty an ideal social relationship between an individual and the
political authorities. By extension, an ideal political state would emerge if every
individual is fully engaged in aesthetic semblance. The strength of this work lies in
the visioning capacity Schiller allows aesthetic detachment to develop. We are deeply
restricted in our immediate experience, composed of sensory correspondences of
external objects, but from which one can be detached once fully engaged in aesthetic
imagination, and reach social harmony ultimately even when the sense experiences
foretell the impossibility of it.
We are now in a better position to understand the form of A Modern Utopia: the
fiction derives largely from allegorizing the mind drama, as Schiller delineates,
between attachment to and detachment from the immediate experience by narrating a
conflict of the two characters, the Owner of the Voice and the botanist, since the latter
allegorizes, especially in his nostalgic disposition toward his unrequited love, the pull
toward immediate sense experiences and base desire. The Botanist represents a type
of science-informed experts, whom the Owner of the Voce bluntly ridicules for their
inflexibility in thinking and lack of imagination: “You scientific people, with your
fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that
Wordsworthian doggerel on the title page of Nature says, “for aye,” are marvelously
without imagination” (21).Supposedly because the Botanist is tied to the sense
experiences and sets his eyes merely on the appearance of objects instead of social
relationships, he has almost insurmountable difficulty perceiving differences between
there, even to the meanest pondweed or the remotest Alpine blossom” (13).
The erection of a new world does not merely depend on what could be called
“infrastructures.” Even if the world is already there physically, the question of how to
get ready for it staunchly remains. By this plot design Wells has also the advantage of
bringing into focus the question of cultivation of aesthetic detachment (or
“disinterestedness” in Matthew Arnold’s word) in the interaction between the two
characters. Most of time the Botanist seems to act as the opposite to the Owner of
Voice in his preoccupation: the former on his past love, and the latter on the new
world. Yet, the Owner of Voice would envy the Botanist for his ability of “blending
in,” to share his nostalgia with a passer-by in small talks. Moreover, the Owner of the
Voice would occasionally sympathize with the Botanist’ plight and become cognizant
of the difficulty of elevating oneself in a lofty imagination. Right before the climax of
the novel, the meeting with the Samurai double, the Owner of the Voice, seeing the
despondent Botanist, comes to understand how it is to be gnawed at by unrequited
love. The Owner of the Voice laments, “We agreed to purge this State and all the
people in it of traditions, associations, bias, laws, and artificial entanglements, and
begin anew; but we have no power to liberate ourselves. Our past, even its accidents,
its accidents above all, and ourselves, are one” (257).Thus, a tension between this
world and the new world reaches a new height. In the story between the Owner of the
Voice and the Botanist, Wells foregrounds the slow coming to terms with a new
reality and the necessity of cultivation against a “realistic” perspective.17
Although occasionally tugged back to a factual Victorian reality, the momentum
of the plot starts when the Owner of the Voice senses the piquancy of wanting to his
double, the same but a higher self: “I doubt if we shall meet our doubles, or if it would
17
This resurges at the last discussion on the utopia when the Owner of the Voice cautions the reader to be on guard against racial prejudices. “We may watch against it and prevent it doing any great
be pleasant for us to do so” (25). The climax is reached and so is his aesthetic
assemblance at the moment when he meets his utopian double and finds out how the
class of Samurai rules the world. The Samurai double is the one who develops the
faculty of imagination. Central to this utopian state are those “possessing imagination
that range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to bring the
discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and recognition” (266). The
utopia recognizes “the ultimate significance in life in individuality, novelty and the
undefined, would not only regard the poietic element as the most important element in
human society, but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility of its organization”
(274).
A Schillerian aesthetic imagination is necessarily subject to a frail balance
between detachment and attachment. This utopian planet of Wells is by no means a
locale completely detached, independent of the Earth, but remains one similar to the
the latter with major threats: “a world of uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes,
antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and vermin, out of men and women with
like passions, like uncertainties of mood and desire to our own,” (7-8). It is important
to note that one cannot stray too far away from the immediate factual life of changes
and dangers. In a typical Schillerian view, any aesthetic activity, if deeply ungrounded,
runs the risk of becoming delusionary (“not logical semblance” in Schiller’s words).
This is what after all happens to the Owner of the Voice, who “forget[s] that a Utopia
is a thing of the imagination that becomes more fragile with every added circumstance,
that, like a soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and variously coloured at the very instant
of its dissolution” (352). In addition, the reality check sets in too. After a long journey
in this utopian world state, the Botanist still remains fixated on his perspective on the
identical appearance. At the remark of the botanist’s deep disbelief in the utopian
“There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in London and clothed
in the fashion of the town. The sullen roar of London fills our ears . . .” (Omission
mark original, 358). The imagination of a world state collapses because the Owner of
the Voice and the Botanist destroy the delicate tension by pulling each other far into
an opposite direction, one saoring to imagination and the other staying on the
empricial observations of the surface details of senses.
One could consider A Modern Utopia to be a sustained work of Schillerian
“aesthetic semblance.” This doubling of the Earth, a typical instance of aesthetic
semblance, detaches the reader from the immediate everyday life of the Earth and
invites him to imagine a better one. As the Owner of the Voice constantly reminds the
reader, the utopian reality is authored and thus authorized by no other but himself:
“Thank Heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate decision rests with me” (67).
The narrator is never shy about revealing “artistic limitations” of this creation (9).
That is, the Owner of the Voice begins to, in Deery’s word, “hypothesize” a utopian
world, rendering outputs of his imagination into concrete shapes. Notwithstanding, I
would agree with Deery only up to a point. He considers this work subjective, so
much so that Wells allows the story to take control, and implies a loss of rational
authorial craftsmanship in some confusing parts (221). This judgment in effect misses
the mark, circumnavigating Wells’s major premise that individual subjectivism is the
starting point of the journey toward a better world. The legitimacy of this individual’s
creative imagination is underwritten by a free play of individual consciousness in the
Schillerian sense. And it follows aesthetic semblance is an activity full of tensions and
sustained efforts. In A Modern Utopia, Wells shares with Schiller two imperatives:
first, the unyielding optimism to strike a balance between the supposedly
contradictory demands of an individual and the society in general; second, the
2. The Globe as the Victorian City enlarged
With an imagined better double of the Earth, Wells capitalizes on Schillerian
aestheticism to concretize a modern urge of welcoming social changes of large scales.
Wells’s globalism has often been characterized as a technological utopia but one
should not be misled into believing that Wells is so immersed in some science fiction
fantasy to lose a grip of history. Without doubt, Wells partook profoundly in
controversies of his own time as the profusion of topical references in this hybrid
novel can prove. Most of all, he puts to use a range of then newly developed
techniques of population controls, or what Patrick Joyce properly calls “technologies
of governance,” and broadens the applied province of them into a globalized setting to
explore their social consequences. I will enumerate instances of them below,
including public transportation, the management of poverty relief, regime of public
health, and trusteeship to demonstrate how the Owner of the Voice radiates an
unflagging optimism in “modernity at large,” to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s appellation
of globalization: “a general consolidation of a great number of common public
services over areas of considerable size is not only practicable, but very desirable”
(76).18
First of all, the Wellsian utopia glamorizes public transportation technologies for
the benefits they might bring to the freedom of movement globally. If the first electric
tramway in London opened on 15 May 1903, and many other technological
innovations of transportation, such as trains, steel ships, steel bridges, horse-drawn
tramways and undergrounds, were in place for some time, Wells carries to a logical
conclusion to imagine that the entire planet would be permeated with traffic routes for
18
Here I want to stress the formation factor of Wells’s liberalism comes much from his realization of social implications of Victorian urban technologies of governance. Steven McLean is one that reminds us of Wells’ connection with Victorian liberalism. McLean might be right about an influence of Mill’s thought of liberalism over Wells, but it does not necessarily follow that Mill is the only source.
the public. The varieties of this technological development are wide, including
“interurban communications” (42), “webs of inconspicuous special routs” over the
world (45), “great tramways” (46) and the high speed train that runs two hundred
miles per hour (240). Even more importantly, what enthrall Wells are not merely
innovative wonders in these diverse machines, but their rich socio-political
consequences of enabling freedom of movement. World-wide transportation makes
possible the basic condition of this utopia as a social body completely fluid in itself,
“beyond any earthly precedent, not simply a travelling population, but migratory”
(47). In turn, the unremitting flows of people warrant even more salient results. Above
all, “[i]n the Modern Utopia travel must be in the common texture of life,” declares
the Owner of the Voice (43). Freedom of finding jobs wherever they are available,
unthinkable in the Victorian restrictions of settlement, is now given automatically to
any citizen: “[a] free change of locality once or twice a year from a region of
restricted employment to a region of labor shortage will be among the general
privileges of the Utopian citizen” (150). In contrast, the severest punishment for
criminals in this liquid world then is to deprive them of physical freedom by confining
them in insular territories.
At this point it is appropriate to explicate the second important meaning of being
kinetic: flows of people on a planetary scale. It also has a derivative meaning; in this
condition each locale is a reflection point of the world of flows, in sharp contrast with
the idea of it as a fixed center: ‘indeed all local establishments, all definitions of place,
are even now melting under our eyes” (162). This meaning can be seen as a positive
anticipation of what Anthony Giddens calls “disembeddedness” or what Roland
Robertson christens “relativization”19 of globalization around the turn of the
19
twenty-first century. Less frequently observed but vitally important is the point Wells
utters almost in one breath freedom of movement and freedom in general as if the
latter is not a right itself but a condition guaranteed by technologies of movement.
Second, Wells’s conception of a proto world welfare state transposes Victorian
practices of local poverty reliefs onto a global space. Contextually, one controversy in
particular that dates Wells’s proposal of global welfare was the social inquiries
separately conducted by two groups, respectively led by members of Charity
Organization and socialist Fabians. Rising dissatisfaction with the New Poor Law was
followed by the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress in 1905.
The concern of striking a delicate balance between how to prevent a depletion of local
resources in social aids and how to maintain social security in areas of migratory
populations continued to haunt reform-minded intellectuals in the very early twentieth
century. In the novel, however, the Owner of the Voice alludes to the Victorian
practices of the workhouse, again, a vital measure predominantly foregrounded in the
New Poor Law, to remind the reader that Wells’s pseudo-welfare policies seeks to
address what the project of the Victorian social reforms failed to do. Extremely
discontented with Fabians’ attempt of keeping their deliberations within the limit of
an urban locale, in response Wells pitches in a new direction, pushing the old
practices onto a global scale. Seen in the light of global migration, priorities would
change completely and the legitimization of social aids cannot be derived locally and
limited by local resources. When atomized in a world of migration, each individual is
given a minimum protection everywhere he or she goes: “It will insist upon every
citizen being properly housed, well nourished, and in good health, reasonably clean perspectives in which “globalization proceeds, challenges are “increasingly presented to the stability of particular perspectives on, and collective and individual
and clothed healthily, and upon that insistence its labour laws will be founded” (138).
Thus, Wells practically makes social aids “portable,” so to speak, to an individual,
who is always free to roam the earth. The right to social reliefs is similar to that to
property: “he would receive as a shareholder in the common enterprise and not with
any insult of charity” (141).
The significance of Wells’s reengineering of Victorian social aids is hardly
exhausted by readers of A Modern Utopia to the best of my knowledge. One might
suppose that Wells shows a strong collectivist outlook in the proposal of the world
state welfare, but it could be argued otherwise. Insisting on providing anyone
anywhere some basic cares, Wells comes very close to a discourse of human rights, an
individual’s inalienable claims to the humanity at large. And in this sense one can
contend that Wells’s social cares work for the cause of individualism instead and later
in his life Wells became one of the first initiators of the human rights discourse during
the twentieth century, and his proposal merged into the version eventually endorsed
by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations in
1948.20 21
Third, Wells’s discussions on public health, including the environmental hygiene
and mild population control, are variations of the Victorian models of the said
measures. To begin with, the improvement of Victorian public hygiene is represented
mostly via the Samurai double’s reflection on social changes and his own social role.
In the dialogue with the Owner of the Voice, the better double jubilantly declares,
“Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly pushing back old age and death, and keeping
20
Wells used all of his personal influences, gave lectures and wrote editorials to promote a draft of human rights declaration. In early 1940 he published the draft in a book entitled The Rights of Man or
What Are We Fighting For?.
21
Wells’s change of Victorian practices is of significance as an antecedent that corresponds to a sharp turn of attention to human rights issues in the early twenty-first century when migration moves unprecedented amount of people out of their habitats in which they grow up.
men hale and hearty to eighty and more” (285). In fact, the doppelganger of the
protagonist simply reiterates both the history and the prospect of hygiene reforms in
the nineteenth century. For instance, when the utopian self explains utopians are
vegetarians because they want to do away with hygienic problems associated with
“slaughter-houses” (286), he effectively alludes to the history of moving cattle
markets and slaughter-houses from the center of the city in the nineteenth century.22
As if very much content with the progress of public hygiene improvement, the
Samurai double turns away from public hygiene issues and takes on instead the task
of devising a better scheme of imprisonment to address current complaints against the
measure of extreme insulation (278).
Compared with the matter of public hygiene, Wells spends much more space on
pseudo-eugenic policies. As a work that emerged at the turn of the century, proposals
regarding population control were inevitably entwined with the contemporary
discourse of eugenics. Although overlapping with some eugenic claims of birth
control, Wells’s preventionism is in essence different from the kind of eugenics
Francis Galton advertised around the turn of the century (211). The idea of burden
invites Wells to evoke key concerns that launched Victorian social reforms chiefly led
by Chadwick. Wells seeks control of birth for fear that children might claim social
aids. That is, Wells considers it appropriate to conduct birth control to alleviate
burdens of the society in general. This elaboration of social burden then is sharply
distinguished from Galton’s emphasis on elimination measures in population
control.Wells in this instance seeks to steer a middle path between individual freedom
and interventionism. The utopians entertain substantial hope for self-motivated
improvement: “people will exercise foresight and self-restraint to escape even the
possibilities of hardship and discomfort” (185). However, forceful measures are
22
proposed to prevent reproductive burdens. For instance, couples of ill health or
inadequate wages are not qualified for marriage. One should add that Wells’s
judgment of the women question is deeply entangled in or even subsidiary to his
deliberation of “reproductive competition” (135). A case in point is that childbearing
and rearing are regarded as “a service done” “to the whole community” (190).23
Finally, Wells’s forging of a Samurai class is, in spite of its foreign branding, no
more than a continued thought on a British question of social trusteeship, starting
from social reforms of Chadwick and further theorized by Stuart Mill,24 in which “the
intention to develop has been framed by trusteeship” (Cowen and Shenton 57). Wells
persists in dwelling on qualifications and cultivation of trustees of the society. Among
all of the utopian proposals, the formation of a global elite force for ruling over others
is the most misunderstood, perhaps because of the militant overtone of the allusion to
Japanese swordsmen and the historical associations of such an order with fascist
regimes in the history of WWII.25 However, the chapter on the class of “voluntary
nobility” discusses much less on the institutional roles over others than on the
cultivation of youths to be trustees of the global society. Wells places great weight on
values of inventiveness and exercises of detachment. The Samurai recruits affiliates
mainly from the top category of the four classes of the society, the poetic, the kinetic,
the Dull and the Base (which we could roughly translate into the creative, the
executive, and the common). The class divisions are flexible since it is said that such
a perceived social order is merely a classification to an end (270). As with Stuart Mill,
Wells values individuality and creativity but more than Mill Wells would advance
what the cliché of today would dub as “institutional incentives of creativity”: “a great
23
Again, Wells may sound very much like a socialist, valuing the community over an individual. In fact, I would say he is much more a biologist than a socialist in this instance.
24
Wells’s concern of education and global progress is long standing as one of his final works The
Open Conspiracy shows.
25
For a historical account of Wells’s reputation of his being “the authoritarian and racist” in the early 1930s, please read Philip Coupland’s “H. G. Wells’s ‘Liberal Fascism.’”
variety of devices by which poietic men and women were given honour and enlarged
freedoms” (275). In addition, the world state stipulates a routine practice of a solitary
journey in the wild to promote a ruling member’s detachment from the immediate
everyday life. The utopian self describes how in one star gazing moment in the desert
he was transported into an elevated conception of his self: “[o]ne becomes an
ambassador of mankind to the outer world” (308).
We might recall here my early point on the social agency of intellectuals in urban
governance. Sociologically speaking, Wells participated in the shared critique of
capital by the class of professionals around the turn of the century, as described by
Harold Perkin (The Rise of the Professional Society 159). Wells removes wealth from
being a necessary qualification of the voluntary nobility by regarding social
classifications based upon land or capital as “accidental categories” (265).
Furthermore, an individual is required to take “a vow of moderate poverty” upon
entering the order of Samurai and denies this membership to be a channel of reaping
profit (288). In these ways, Wells virtually takes over the governorship of the society
from the wealthy to be given to the educated as trustees. One might speculate,
nevertheless, that Wells dodges an ensuing problem of whether to pronounce the
professional class to be the only qualified. It is said that utopians do not enforce an
original rule that a member should be one with the training of “a Technique” (282).
Professional training becomes an undecided quality presumably because it might
imply a denial of membership to workers. Wells chooses to anchor the appeal of the
Samurai class on the Victorian value of character building; a guardian of the society is
one who possesses “a certain steadiness of purpose, a certain self-control and
submission” (281). In this case, one can trace an emerging struggle by the
professionals to grasp the legitimacy of being trustees of the society in general.
to the entirety of the globe. He believes the cosmopolis could naturally stem from
globalized technologies of liberal governance. The Owner of the Voice once
challenges the audience with a rhetorical question: “Utopia has sound sanitary laws,
sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are these people [of different
racial or ethnic backgrounds] going to do?”(339) I would like to bring to the fore the
central double in the novel. Critics observe the doubling of individual identities in this
work, but I contend this doubling of the major character is just a secondary feature,
merely a derivative effect of the major kind of doubling, that of the social
environments: the dominating double of this utopia writing is the globe as the city and
the geographical city mirroring the globe in its flows of people.
3. An Imaginary of Classical Globalization: London as a Wellsian Cosmopolis
The creative attempts of H. G. Wells’s utopian writing express a cosmopolitan
imaginary of classical globalization. In what follows I bring up two major kinds of
social relationship privileged in A Modern Utopia, a conception of global exchange,
and a forging of the city as the networking center of global people flows, to portray
this social imaginary.
First of all, the Wellsian utopia is intrinsically in sync with the ideal of classical
globalization controlled by the gold standard. At first sight, Wells seems to propose to
eradicate the gold standard, the underpinning of classical globalization. The idea of
flows is so strong that even trading itself is considered a sign of barriers. Wells would
like to remove gold from the circuit of global exchanges because he considers a
representation of flows cannot be rendered onto a material, believing that
globalization should be subject to the material fluctuations as one finds in gold (75).
In fact, except the speculations resulted from trading, he completely accepts what the
gold standard embodies: “it is the water of the body social, it distributes and receives,
Therefore, the Owner of the Voice proposes an alternative: this world is to be
regulated by a standard measured by units of energy, supposedly better than the gold
standard for its immaterial and readily transferrable quality.
In this utopia of global flows emerges a mega-city-centered geography. The
binary opposition between the city and nature has been buttressed by the preferred
Schillerean prioritization of art over nature. On the one hand, nature means raw
materials and object of sensory experiences, from which one should cultivate some
distance in activities of aesthetic imagination. It is no wonder that in the chapter on
the nature of the utopia the Owner of the Voice does not want to listen to a defense of
undeveloped nature by a utopian character he comes across. The apology of nature is
taken to be “overbearing” to the point of being idiosyncratic. Unlike the Owner of the
Voice, the Botanist, again, the allegorized image of a “naturalist,” can engage in a
conversation with the garrulous utopian, and their talk quickly turns to the Botanist’s
favorite subject, his lost love. The Owner of the Voice cannot hold his contempt of the
pettiness of this topic in comparison with imagination and declares, “I can’t attempt to
explain these vivid spots and blind spots in the imaginations of sane men; there they
are!” (124)
While the nature is associated with an undesirable lingering in the raw state, the
city epitomizes the accomplishments of inventive utopians. The new world is
dominated by cities, which reflect in urban networking capacity the flows of the
people. In fact, an important device of the setting in A Modern Utopia is the working
of Paris in the background. Paris is said to house an index center that archives identity
information of every individual of the globe. The processing of identity information in
Paris allows the Owner of the Voice to locate his double so he can be transported to be
with him and discuss the Samurai class. Beyond Paris, in the second half of the
reversed from a location of seamy corners to a place full of light, where flows of
people daily visit and the institutes within have been busily gathering knowledge.
Utopian London “designed by the artist-engineer[s],” sits at the apex of artistic efforts
of the humankind (Hillegas, A Modern Utopia xxii). The Owner of the Voice amazes
at the wonders of buildings, which “will have flung great arches and domes of glass
above the wider spaces of the town, the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work far
overhead will be softened to a fair-like unsubstantiality by the mild London air”
(emphasis mine 244). This new metropolis exults in the Victorian vogue enabled by
the massive use of steel and glass. Moreover, the utopian buildings resemble the style
of the glass dome of the Great Exhibition (1851), in which the frames of brick and
mortar almost disappeared to allow sunlight to beam on the objects gathered from all
over the world.
London also serves as a functional center of “social and intellectual exchange”
(243). One obvious trait of the urban landscape is the plethora of hotels: “the cliffs of
crowded hotels, the hotels that are still glowing with internal lights” (244). Another is
the proliferation of such institutional centers as universities, libraries, and museums.
These all are sites for the encyclopedic knowledge of the world (163) This belief in
encyclopedic knowledge is derived from the Enlightenment hope that extensive
cataloguing of objects can harness the global knowledge into one physical locale. At
an early point of the book, the Owner of the Voice already proclaims with confidence,
“Bacon’s visionary House of Salomon will be a thing realized, and it will be humming
with this business” (60). In short, London remains a world city of the future because it
is reshaped to mirror the globe in key aspect of its functions: the magnificence of the
city then comes from its capacity of extensive reach to every corner of the globe as a
center of travel and knowledge.
My reading of A Modern Utopia would provoke, I hope, the important question
of how historically we have been conceiving of a world tightly connected, in which
people flows are the dominant concern. H. G. Wells experimented to give an
expression of what he considered the trends of the future. In the creative visions
discussed in this paper, the expanding city of the late nineteenth century England was
one of the ruling contexts. This artistic shaping of cosmopolitan imaginary points to
the future as an urbanized one, so much so that any fantasy adventure of world starts
right where the urbanites stand. London as an imagined city in the Wellsian utopia
substantiates what the Great Exhibition of 1851 stands for, the vision of light that
takes for granted imperialism and celebrates in the urban locale concentration of
commodities brought forth by global trading. Then, I would say to insist on this
historical situating of cosmopolitan imaginary is to think of the city as a persistently
dominant form of contemporary global visions.
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本次移地研究參加位於匈牙利布達佩斯的 Central European University 所舉辦的夏 季學程（2007 年七月十六號至二十二號）。參加者為副教授、助理教授及博士候 選人。台灣方面只有我一人。 此次移地研究收獲豐富。玆簡述如下: 首先,該夏季學程安排的學習內容豐富。更重要的是目前唯一針對我的研究專長 而有的學程。是千載難逢的機會。我在其間研究的是跨國公司與文化改變的問題。 其次, 從這次交流活動中發現西歐及北美以外的研究關照。學員除有若干來自北 美,大部份其實來自東歐及俄國。在學習過程中,包括課堂討論、課堂報告,課外實 習中與他們進行實質的交流。提展我的研究視野。台灣長期以來進行文學交流活 動，概以歐、美、日地區為主，且偏向美國居多，甚少和東歐地區的研究著聯繫， 應鼓勵台灣其他的研究者也參加類似的活動。 第三、在此次參訪的基礎下，希望未來能繼續與學者保持密切聯繫。在其中向幾 位授課教師表達希望他們能到台灣訪問、交流。在 2008 年五月,主辦人 Imre Szeman (Director of Globalization Studies, McMaster University)及另一位教師 Eric Cazdyn (Comparative Literature, University of Tonoro)同意來訪。也替台灣介紹全球化文化的 研究頂尖的學者。
Nádor u. 9., Budapest, Hungary 1051 Tel.: (36 1) 327 3069, 327 3811 Fax: (36-1) 328-3698 or (36-1) 327-3124 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.ceu.hu/sun C CuullttuurraallSSttuuddiieess//CCuullttuurraallTThheeoorryy
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YSSTTEEMM J Juullyy 1166-- 2277,, 22000077Course Director: Imre Szeman, McMaster University, Institute on Globalization, Canada
Faculty: Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois-Chicago Eric Cazdyn, University of Toronto
Maria Elisa Cevasco, University of São Paulo Günter Lenz, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Helen Petrovsky, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of
Sciences
Will Straw, McGill University, Canada
BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE
Viewed through the lens of cultural studies, globalization (both as rhetoric and reality) has had two broad effects on how researchers, policy makers, and those engaged in the
things) new technologies of cultural diffusion, has meant that cultural critics have to contend with a world in which culture and cultures bump up against one another with more frequency and intensity than ever before. From this perspective, the interesting questions to pose about culture today seem to have to do primarily with the results—whether positive or negative, emancipating or threatening—of the modes and forms of hybridization, standardization, and bricolage that are the results of the globalization of culture.
Such a perspective tends to conserve older ideas of culture even as they attempt to embrace the new realities of globalization—ideas concerning the function and meaning of culture that extend back to the modern origins of the concept, where it was imagined to be (relatively) autonomous vis-à-vis the market or other spheres of society, linked to the national soil or ‘context’ in which it is produced, and defined mainly by its function as “the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (Raymond Williams). However, if there is any content at all to the idea of globalization, it is that the levels into which we have long separated the study of the social (always artificial to begin with) have been shown now to be definitively unworkable. In describing globalization as “complex connectivity,” the sociologist John Tomlinson suggests that “the complexity of linkages established by globalization extends to phenomena which social scientists have laboured to separate out into the categories into which we now, familiarly, break down human life: the economic, the political, the social, the interpersonal, the technological, the environmental, the cultural, and so forth. Globalization arguably confounds such taxonomy” (13). The
second analytic perspective on culture in the era of globalization thus asks what it means for cultural production and cultural analysis if culture is now (for complex reasons extending well beyond the epistemic ones identified by Tomlinson here) no longer relatively autonomous, but truly collapsed into other phenomena. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson has suggested that today the “sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian.” What does it mean for contemporary cultural analysis if we are to take such an insight seriously?
