The aesthetics of Utopia Creation, creativity and a critical theory of design

TL;DR: In this article, the authors combine critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design is a Utopian process and that the Utopians dimension is not simply a matter of subject matter or subject matter.

Abstract: This article combines critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design is a Utopian process. Crucially, the Utopian dimension is not simply a matter of subject matter or u...

Summary

CREATION, CREATIVITY AND A CRITICAL THEORY OF

• Thesis Eleven by Richard Howells Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries King’s College, London, United Kingdom Accepted for publication September 2013 Please note:.
• This is a pre-publication typescript of a published article which has been placed here in compliance with King’s College London policy on open access.
• Dr Richard Howells Reader in Culture, Media and Creative Industries Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries King’s College London Strand, London WC2R 2LS United Kingdom Email richard.howells@kcl.ac.uk.

Keywords

• Utopia, aesthetics, Bloch, Navajo, creativity, design, critical theory According to Plato: ‘Art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously’ (Plato, 2000).
• But Plato was wrong, because aesthetics, creativity and design both illuminate and constitute the path to Utopia.
• The relevant concepts of Bloch’s philosophy will be explained, followed by their case study of the interrelationship between Navajo culture, theology and design as articulated both in the practice of weaving and in the theology of the Navajo creation myth, the Din4 Bahane'.
• The authors will see that not only do the arts serve as representations of possible Utopias, but that creativity and design are also Utopian processes in themselves; formal processes that reveal both the need for and the practice of constructing a better world than the one that they inherit.
• It contends that the need to create beauty beyond function, order out of disorder, and to improve upon the world as the authors find it is common across cultures in both time and space.

DEFINING UTOPIA

• Utopia is a word famously first used by Sir Thomas More as the name of his ideal, imaginary island in his seminal Utopia of 1516.
• Here, Utopians enjoyed a comprehensive welfare state in which the concept of private property did not exist.
• There was religious toleration, and it all amounted, declared More, to ‘the most civilized nation in the world’ (More 1965: 69-70).
• Since the publication of More’s Utopia, the word has come to stand for all ideal places and not just this one particular imaginary island.
• Adam and Eve were invited to take naked pleasure in the garden and all it offered –except for a certain ‘forbidden fruit.’.

TYPES OF UTOPIA

• From Eden to the present day, there has been no shortage of Utopian writing and even experimentation in western culture.
• This can be especially dangerous as that vision may not be universally shared, and also because history – both ancient and modern- is littered with examples of nefarious acts ‘justified’ in pursuit of some greater, fundamental and presumed good.
• But more than that, so many of history’s ‘ideal’ communities failed to be truly Utopian in that they existed only in anticipation of, and in preparation for, a better world to come –and so were not intrinsically Utopian for their own sake in the present.
• But even within the political genre, there is much difference to be observed.
• He avers that hope still has a necessary place in their ‘collective emotional orientation’, but concludes that what the authors need is not more or better Utopias being written, nor even a revisiting or re-evaluation of the Utopias of the past.

ERNST BLOCH

• Ernst Bloch is both their most important and difficult Utopian thinker.
• ‘studded with opaque metaphor, untranslatable puns, obscure neologisms and overblown rhetoric.’, also known as Indeed, it is.
• (Dickinson 1996: 8)3 Jack Zipes, the English translator of The Utopian Function of Art and Literature admitted: ‘it is sometimes impossible to understand Bloch, even when one has a firm command of German’ (Zipes: 1988b: ix).
• Here, literature, art and popular culture contained the shape of things to come, which helped light the way towards Utopia.
• In The Principle of Hope, Bloch showed how this not-yet-conscious was represented in daydreams and wish-landscapes, together with significant religious, scientific, political, and artistic events.

ARCHTYPES AND PSYCHO ANALYSIS

• A problem with case studies, it may be contended, is that illuminating though they are, they may fail sufficiently to make the link between the phenomenal and the noumenal and so make their examples seem isolated or simply anecdotal.
• The trickster features in both the arts and in Jungian literary theory.
• He continues with the unwittingly Blochian sentiment that:.
• The history of their truly great creative men and women bears witness to this through their works.
• The connection is all the more striking when Meltzer states that the human mind can only discover its own beauty once it has discovered that of both nature and the works of mankind.

HOMO AESTHETICUS

• As early as 1926, the British aesthetician Roger Fry was grappling with the seemingly strange need of humankind to integrate art into life.
• Yet in spite of that, people had: ‘never, I believe, continued to exist without art of some kind.
• Cave art, he contends, cannot be fully explained by ‘utilitarian’ theory, while these and other art forms only became possible after ‘an evolutionary advance when humans developed a capacity for abstract thought’ (Wilson 2012: 277).
• Dissanayake also uses the example of the Navajo, who: ‘strike to achieve balance and harmonization in their arts as well as their lives’.

THE UTOPIAN FUNCTION OF FORM

• Navajo diyogi,–to say nothing of much of the history of Western painting from the early 20th century- are essentially non-figurative.
• Indeed, continued Bell, with their concentration on the creation of form, such cultural texts could become ‘the finest works of art that the authors possess’ (Bell 1928: 25).
• That, I contend, is why the Navajo weave beautiful rugs from the raw material of their hostile environment.
• As Bloch says: ‘The montage of the fragment out of the old existence is here the experiment of its reutilization into a new one’ (Bloch 1977: 228).
• Meltzer, drawing on his travels to the Mediterranean, believed from an early age that: ‘to breathe life and beauty into stone seemed to me the highest possible aspiration’ (Meltzer & Williams 1988: xxi).

ATHEISTIC CHRISTIANITY

• Bloch begins The Spirit of Utopia by declaring: ‘Life has been put into their hands’ (Bloch 2000: 1).
• The Navajo, of course, remain avowedly theistic, but viewed from Bloch’s perspective, the authors can see the urge both to create beauty and the collaboration with the gods in creation itself as something that already lies within and not in opposition to Navajo theology and visual culture.
• What Bloch wanted therefore to do was ‘break out’ of the traditional interpretation of the sacred texts and instead ‘find the things in religion that actually unbind rather than bind us’ (Thompson 2009: xiv).
• This, surely, is what Bloch had already seen as: ‘the transformation of heaven as the preserve of God into heaven as the city of man’ with the new heaven and earth finally ‘fully anthropocentric’ (Bloch 2009: 67).
• ”14 Bloch approached what he describes as ‘ornament’ in an early chapter of his first major work, The Spirit of Utopia (Bloch 2000).

Author biography

• Richard Howells is Reader in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.
• He is a cultural sociologist with particular interests in visual and popular culture, together with cultural and critical theory.
• His The Myth of the Titanic and Visual Culture were both published as second editions in 2012, while his Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society, is forthcoming, edited with Andreea Deciu Ritivoi and Judith Schachter of Center for the Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University, where he was previously Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Notes:

• The research was carried out in 1974, but as the traditional method and process has not changed since then, the estimate remains useful.
• 11 There are, of course, clear connections with Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the cultural reconciliation of binary oppositions here.

Full text

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DOI:
10.1177/0725513614543414
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Citation for published version (APA):
Howells, R. (2014). The Aesthetics of Utopia: Creation, Creativity and a Utopian Theory of Design. Thesis
Eleven, 123(1), 41-61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513614543414
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Download date: 09. Aug. 2022

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THE AESTHETICS OF UTOPIA:
CREATION, CREATIVITY AND A CRITICAL THEORY OF
DESIGN
Thesis Eleven
by
Richard Howells
Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries
King’s College, London, United Kingdom
Accepted for publication September 2013
Please note: This is a pre-publication typescript of a published article which has been placed
here in compliance with King’s College London policy on open access. You are of course
urged to read and cite the real, published version: Richard Howells, “Looking for Utopia:
Creation, Creativity and a Utopian Theory of Design” in Thesis Eleven, Vol. 123(1) 41–61,
2014, pp 41-61. DOI: 10.1177/0725513614543414.
Dr Richard Howells
Reader in Culture, Media and Creative Industries
Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries
King’s College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
Email
richard.howells@kcl.ac.uk

2

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THE AESTHETICS OF UTOPIA:
CREATION, CREATIVITY AND A CRITICAL THEORY OF DESIGN
Richard Howells
King’s College London
Abstract
This article combines critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design
is a Utopian process. Crucially, the Utopian dimension is not simply a matter of subject
matter or utility. Rather, it lies in the act of formal arrangement and composition, and
therefore can apply to visual texts with no apparent subject matter at all. The argument is
grounded in Ernst Bloch’s critical theory of Utopia, which sees Utopia as a process rather
than a destination. It is illustrated with a case study of Navajo weaving, in tandem with an
analysis of Navajo creation mythology. It concludes by arguing that we need to go beyond
creation theory to a critical theory of creativity: Utopia is not something that we can delegate
either to nature or to the supernatural, because as Bloch declares in The Spirit of Utopia, ‘Life
has been put into our hands.’
Keywords
Utopia, aesthetics, Bloch, Navajo, creativity, design, critical theory

4
According to Plato: ‘Art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously’ (Plato, 2000). But Plato
was wrong, because aesthetics, creativity and design both illuminate and constitute the path
to Utopia.
We will begin with the concept and definition of Utopia before looking in greater
depth at its various types and cultural manifestations. This in turn will lead us to a particular
focus on Ernst Bloch and the idea that Utopia is manifest in visual and popular culture. The
relevant concepts of Bloch’s philosophy will be explained, followed by our case study of the
interrelationship between Navajo culture, theology and design as articulated both in the
practice of weaving (diyogi) and in the theology of the Navajo creation myth, the
Din4
Bahane'. It is a confluence that creates order out of disorder and meaning out of
meaninglessness, and expressed by the Navajo concept of h0zh=. Yet it is an argument that at
the same time goes beyond Bloch and the Navajo: We will see that not only do the arts serve
as representations of possible Utopias, but that creativity and design are also Utopian
processes in themselves; formal processes that reveal both the need for and the practice of
constructing a better world than the one that we inherit. Weaving is therefore both an act and
a metaphor. The argument is expanded with reference to Jungian archetypes, the concept of
Homo Aestheticus, and Bloch’s atheistic Christianity. It contends that the need to create
beauty beyond function, order out of disorder, and to improve upon the world as we find it is
common across cultures in both time and space. In so doing it seeks to bring together
seemingly diverse approaches and case studies to elucidate our common humanity.
DEFINING UTOPIA
Utopia is a word famously first used by Sir Thomas More as the name of his ideal,
imaginary island in his seminal Utopia of 1516. Here, Utopians enjoyed a comprehensive
welfare state in which the concept of private property did not exist. Everyone enjoyed a six-

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "The aesthetics of utopia: creation, creativity and a critical theory of design" ?

This article combines critical, visual and aesthetic theory to argue that the very act of design is a Utopian process. It is illustrated with a case study of Navajo weaving, in tandem with an analysis of Navajo creation mythology. It concludes by arguing that the authors need to go beyond creation theory to a critical theory of creativity: Utopia is not something that they can delegate either to nature or to the supernatural, because as Bloch declares in The Spirit of Utopia, ‘ Life has been put into their hands. ’ 

Q2. What was the first use of dyes in weaving?

Packaged dyes were used by some weavers from the transitional period, while pre-cleaned, pre-carded and sometimes pre-dyed materials were introduced from 1950s. 

Q3. What was the importance of using the cultural past to pre-figure the future?

It was important to use the cultural past to pre-figure the future because of what Blochcalled ‘the darkness of the immediately experienced moment.’ 

Q4. What is the Navajo's history of weaving?

It is thought that the Navajo learned something of weaving from the Puebloan peoples, who had been working with cotton and upright loomssince around 1100 AD. 

Q5. What does Bloch see in the Navajo?

The Navajo, of course, remain avowedly theistic, but viewed from Bloch’s perspective, the authors can see the urge both to create beauty and the collaboration with the gods in creation itself as something that already lies within and not in opposition to Navajo theology and visual culture. 

Q6. What did Bloch see as a hope for the future?

he saw within this a hope for the future, in which he urged: ‘May art henceforth stray far from utility… may great technique dominate, an unburdening, cool, ingenious, democratic “luxury” for all…’ (Bloch 2000: 15). 

Q7. What is the recurring theme of the Navajo culture?

it is underlined by the recurring importance of the Navajo word h0zh=, which is best translated into English as a combination of order, beauty, balance and harmony. 

Q8. What is the source for the details of traditional Navajo weaving?

The seminal source for the details of traditional Navajo weaving is Gladys A.Reichard’s 1936 Navajo Shepherd and Weaver (Reichard, 1936), which was re-published in 1974 as Weaving a Navajo Blanket (Reichard, 1974). 

Q9. How long does it take to make a Navajo rug?

Dockstander states that ‘Each step is time consuming but vital to the quality of the finished product’ (Dockstander 1987: 27) and cites research from the Navajo Community College at Many Farms, Arizona, which estimated that it took a total of 345 hours to prepare and make one 3 x 5 foot rug of ‘above average’ quality from start to finish (Dockstander 1987: 32). 

Q10. What was the Navajo’s intention to weave?

during their 19th century imprisonment at Fort Sumner, the Navajo continued to weave with anything they could lay their hands on—including recycled yarn from, it is said, cavalry officers’ underwear. 

Q11. What did Bloch seek to account for in his book?

He sought, inThompson’s words, to account for its ‘potency and strength which remains far in excess of its ability to explain’ (Thompson 2009: ix). 

Q12. What was the common way of revealing meanings in cultural texts?

These preserved meanings were usually unconsciously inserted into the texts by means of überschuss (over-shoot), in which they ended up revealing far more than the author had originally intended.