The potential capacity of imagination to fragment the established
reality and consequently to show possible realities or probabilities inside the
real, is the point where we can find a close link with the notion of utopia.
Utopias are ‘incomplete’ cultural expressions; they are possibilities of reality
that amplify the potential social existence. For Karl Mannheim (1936: 169),
utopias are searching to find a shelter in places and moments where there is
a need to imagine something that does not (or we do not want to) exist in
reality. Utopias have, in this sense, some analogies with the mirror,23 dreams
and the SF genre: they are unreal, with an origin and connection with reality,
and thus ‘represent the reduction of the original abyss between ideas and
reality’ (Ricoeur, 1997: 295).
One of the characteristics of utopias is that they show disagreements
with society through the exposition of alternatives and the reactivation of
unrealities. Utopia implies the idea of a journey to a (non-) place that is
completely different; most of the time this is a journey with a return ticket
to the origin: ‘utopias have become a place without a place, a moment out of
time, the truth of the fiction’ (Marin, 1993: 8). In such a (non-) place the
conflicts of reality have the potential to be faced, analyzed, understood and
overcome. Today, the creation of utopias/dystopias in which the loss of
control over technology and the creation of alternative/virtual worlds are
constantly being reflected, are a clear sign that we are aware of the
problems that our society (potentially) has. Utopia has become an effective
social tool that penetrates inside reality and transforms it, renews it,
23 Indeed, Michael Foucault sees in the mirror a perfect analogy of utopias:
The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see
myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the
surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own
visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is
the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does
exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.
From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I
am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed
toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the
glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself
and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia
in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at
myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that
surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass
through this virtual point which is over there (Foucault, 1998: 2).
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