All Utopias Are Conservative

Herbert’s critique of this seemingly countercultural utopia is precisely aimed at its conservatism. In necessarily rendering life static, the utopian vision must deny the instability of signification and that permits for change and development itself. In making this argument, I am aware that I am (or Herbert is) falling into what Kenneth M. Roemer calls that category of “muckrakers (or ‘stuckrakers’) preoccupied with exposing elements in literary utopias that tend toward changeless states.”21 Still, I trust that he would agree that I make this statement within my larger claim that SF texts can crack open the stagnancy of conservatism through their own reflective and reflexive semiotics, hence Herbert’s ability to critique SF utopias within his decidedly SF text, pointing precisely to what Roemer calls “the contradictions in utopian narratives between their revolutionary, or at least evolutionary, claims and their sometimes dull portraits of stagnant societies.”22 Indeed, this portion of the current book aims to show how certain authors try to negotiate those contradictions.

Utopias, Herbert is arguing, all fall into what Karl Mannheim has deemed the oxymoronic utopia of the conservative mentality.23 Mannheim asserts that a true utopian idea is “incongruous with the state of reality in which it appears,”24 since utopias are necessarily critical of the status quo: one hardly needs to long for a more perfect world if one is perfectly content with this one, after all. In this way, the “utopian mentality,” to use Mannheim’s term, is precisely characteristic of the “cognitive estrangement” that Suvin sees in SF, even as it participates politically in the transformative nature of SF semiotics that I trace in the introduction.

Because of this fact, Mannheim states that the “Conservative mentality as such has no utopia,” and so “Only the counter-attack of opposing classes and their tendency to break through the limits of the existing order causes the conservative mentality to question the basis of its own dominance, and necessarily brings about … a counter-utopia which serves as a means of selforientation and defense.”25 Whereas liberal or other progressive utopias are thus governed by a certain futurity, the conservative mentality is oriented toward the past, Mannheim states, in a form of nostalgia. In the conservative “utopia” (actually figured precisely as the current topos), “the past is experienced as virtually present,”26 since every aspect of the past had to exist in order to lead to the perfection that is the status quo.