The Utopic Stage

Abstract

Utopia is a discourse. Better yet, it is a book or volume of signs disposed in a certain order. These signs owe their meaning to a system of which the book is one among an infinite number of possible realizations. In this volume are found sentences, words, and letters that realize, through their differential values, meaning. This definition is true for any book, process, or text. The differential nature of utopia is of a stylistic nature. It is based on a typology of genres that another syntax orders. With Thomas More’s Utopia as an example, I have noticed that utopia, through its multiple and varied literary spatial play (historical narrative, travel narrative, description, illustrating narratives, etc.), is the textual place of production of a representative figure, of a picture within the text whose function consists in dissimulating, within its metaphor, historical contradiction — historical narrative — by projecting it onto a screen. It stages it as a representation by articulating it in the form of a structure of harmonious and immobile equilibrium. By its pure representability it totalizer the differences that the narrative of history develops dynamically. This representation is the project of a utopic practice that keeps inside of itself traces whose critical force remains in a neutralized area of historical contradiction, making possible the constitution of the figure.