Thomas More's Utopia involves circumlocutory means of distancing the author's self from Hythlodaeus's delineation of the exemplary city. More wanted not only to obscure his actions as an author, but also to give unique credibility to the conceptual hypothesis he sought to fabricate. By giving his “philosophical city” a semblance of reality, he makes his readers see the mechanism at work by means of a feigned description, which is also the essential feature of the utopian genre (Frye 31). A symptom of Renaissance anxiety about the constant entanglement of ideas of dissent, privacy, guilt, and anti-state practices, More's Utopia allocates no private space to its inhabitants. Therefore, “[T]here is . . . no possibilities of seduction, no secret meeting places. . . [E]veryone's eyes are on you, so you are practically obligated to continue your work and use your free time properly” (More 65). Ironically, More is also painfully aware of such views on himself and, therefore, the pretense of second-hand reporting can indeed be interpreted as a protective technique that More avails himself of (Turner xiv). The paradox of this situation can best be identified by investigating how More himself paid with his own life for the degree of surveillance that haunted Renaissance England, or even his silence on the question of Henry VIII's accession. as supreme head of the Church was a betrayal. enough to be sentenced to death. More's utopia, and utopian thought in general, had considerable cultural impact in the context of the emergence of modern sociopolitical conditions of subject formation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayBoth Catholics and communists engaged in what Paul Turner calls "critical tugging" (xi), in an attempt to value theirs. ideologies by borrowing the authority of More. Such an approach betrays only a partial understanding of the utopian tradition to which the work belongs, precisely because it interprets the author's intention as producing, so to speak, "a model of the society towards which we let’s mink” (Popper 157). As Lyman Sergent aptly notes: “few utopias were written with the intention of implementing them in detail, and the history of political thought does not offer models for building new societies” (570 ). Undoubtedly, utopian literature, when considered as a social or political theory, creates a conflict between an artist's intention and the extent to which he chooses (or perhaps is forced) to present himself as the reader's scrutinizing gaze. The way in which More, as an author, tries to have his text banned, cannot only fool a "fool who said that he did not see why More should be so admired for his utopia, since he did not simply wrote down what someone else had told him.” (Turner xiv), but must also keep the intelligent reader on his toes as to the “reality” he is playing with. More's success in forming an almost proto-postmodern philosophy rests in part on his pioneering ability to introduce this element of "play" into his text, the element of ambiguity that locates and dislocates reality through simultaneous interaction of presence and absence. The reader can easily locate the socio-political evils of which Hythlodaeus speaks, but being unable to contextualize them other than as veiled references made even more veiled by the interventions of the dramatic character ofthe author himself inside the text he perceives reality as confused and The relevance of utopia today cannot be appreciated if we try to put it within the shackles of communism or Catholicism, but considered as a spontaneous overflow of intellectual good humor, a delight of debate, paradox, comedy and above all invention which sets off many hares but kills none (Rengasamy xxxii), the text remains heavy with complexities of resonant consciousness with modern concerns of privacy, family, utility, religion and identity. The appearance and disappearance of borders and the multiplication of various ideological borders have not ceased in our time, and “it is precisely at this moment, when new borders appear or reappear, or very old and frightening, those of nationalist, racial or religious exclusions.” — it is precisely at this moment that it is appropriate to recall the fiction of an island that appeared at the dawn of a period of which our current era would form the twilight” (Marin 11). Furthermore, it can be argued that the utilitarianism of the utopians, stemming from their notion of mercy and goodness, has much in common with what Charles Taylor calls "modern utilitarianism" as a secularized variant of Christian spirituality (13 ). The very beginning of Hythlodaeus's arguments marks the cruelty and impudence behind the capital punishment of thieves prevalent in England at the time. Strikingly, his arguments combine compassion and caution as he attempts to demonstrate how widespread poverty must first be addressed instead of punishing the thief who steals primarily out of lack and scarcity of basic amenities resulting from underutilization of human labor and natural resources. More's veiled reformist spiritual zeal comes to us filtered through Hythlodaeus's account of the utilitarianism of non-Christian utopians which can be paralleled with "the impulse of the utilitarian Enlightenment, protesting against the needless and senseless suffering inflicted on humans in the name of… ". . . orders” (Taylor 13). Locating and recognizing the individual subject as a product of social conditions is one of the major axes of Hythlodaeus' argument. As Habermas noted, More's ideal city shares a major feature of Machiavelli's propositions in The Prince (1513): we must first establish the social conditions under which individual subjects can realize their human potential and moral ideals . He says: “virtue and happiness as such are here [in Utopia] conceived in a traditional way; but what is modern is the thesis according to which the technically appropriate organization to respond to the necessities of life, the correct institutional reproduction of society, is prior to the good life, without them representing in themselves the content and purpose of moral action” (Habermas 54). The process of employing “good institutions” in Utopia – which includes the abolition of private property, the source of power and privilege through the accumulation of wealth – however signals an opposing hypothesis of the Prince, namely a movement towards the removal (rather than the strengthening) of the social domination of the few over the many (Dupr? 151). By emphasizing the dependence of the individual's actions on the social system they constitute, Hythlodaeus almost anticipates a poststructuralist concern that seeks to affirm that subjects are not the autonomous creators of themselves or their worlds. social; rather, subjects are embedded in a complex network of social relationships (Namaste 221). Specific social and cultural logic – the key to subject formation – strangely leads to ways in which subjectivitiesare both framed and concealed. We can move on to locating these features at the textual level. More's borrowings from Plato's Republic while shaping his utopia have long been criticized. Aside from the similarities the two share, the ways in which More consciously departs from Plato's ideal are also interesting in this context. The heteropatriarchal family in utopia is central to its functional modus operandi, unlike Plato's republic where marriages are controlled by the government and a woman can be married to multiple men. Marriage to the Utopians appears to be an individual decision in that the otherwise idiosyncratic practice in which man and woman are allowed to see each other completely naked before agreeing to marry is hardly ridiculous. The utopians' attitude toward the power dynamics at work in the family domain also seems to humorously reflect More's own family (Rengasammy xxvi). However, crude maxims such as "husbands are responsible for punishing their wives" (More 85) or the custom that wives must kneel before their husbands every month and ask for forgiveness (with no mention of the fact that the husbands should also do the same). ) to maintain domestic peace appear, the family remains the coherent unit which elects the syphogrants from the administrative structure. Governors are not elected by popular vote but by these syphogrants elected first by families. It remains an open question whether every adult member of the family votes or whether the choice is made solely, for example, by the head of the family, but perhaps in consultation with other family members (Steintrager 363). Utopians place extreme importance on preventing premarital sex by implementing strict laws against it. However, instead of defending such laws by invoking the preservation of the sanctity of marriage, an almost scandalous argument (especially for Catholics) is presented as a defense. They are said to be particularly strict about these rules "because they believe that very few people would want to marry — which means spending their whole lives with the same person and bear all the inconveniences that entails — unless they didn't do it. otherwise, carefully prevented from having sexual intercourse” (More 83-4). This statement takes for granted the intrinsic hedonistic tendency of the common man, more inclined to pleasures than to principles. The sensual aspect of the human mind is brought forward by the hypothesis that, according to natural logic, sexual gratification can become preferable to the "disadvantages" of marital companionship. It is important to note where this logic leads. Their “natural” religion is inextricably linked to “the principles of natural theology…necessary for the support of morality” (Steintrager 370). As Steintrager notes, utopian morality is more hedonistic than the morality of the Republic and, for the ordinary utopian, the check on the excessive pursuit of pleasure is religion (371). The historical moment when More negotiated with Plato's past ideal had a great impact on the ideas he explored in Utopia, even unambiguously defended. In a time when intimacy was freely associated with secrecy and seditious thoughts, the essence of utopian intimacy survives only in marital sexuality and in the individual's ability to choose a partner and even divorce by consent mutual. Actual pleasures, divided “into two categories, mental and physical,” include “sexual intercourse, or any relief of irritation by rubbing or scratching” (More 76-7). The only limiting factor that defines immoralityis simply categorized as “pain,” because “pleasure must not cause pain—which, they argue, is inevitable if pleasure is immoral” (More 79). What appears as an omnipresent principle in such arguments is the immediate corporeality of the pain and pleasure of the individual subject as a direct quotient of privately felt sensory perceptions which would later become major instruments for transmitting to Montaigne knowledge and truth. Although for Descartes and his legacy the emphasis shifts to abstract reason alone, modern times have seen a reappropriation of the individual's sensory experience as having as much relevance as abstract reasoning. Such dialectical ways of preserving the intimacy of pleasure and prohibiting it when it turns into “pain” constitute a key to the formation of the utopian subject. More's fictionalized narrator, Hythlodaeus, is also, above all, a traveler, returning from a trip to the New World as part of Amerigo Vespucci's expedition; and although he admits to "describing their [the utopians'] lives, not defending them" (More 79), he seems particularly concerned with doing just that in many cases. It's fascinating to conceptualize — when "Hythlodaeus means 'dispenser of nonsense', Utopia means 'no place', Anydrus (the name of a river) means 'no water' and Ademus (the title of a chief magistrate) means 'not people'" (Turner xii) — what is the cultural valence of More's ironic view of early modern travelogues, and what is its relationship to the private action of a individual to imagine and reorganize reality through stories of travel and spatial movement. To quote Louis Marin: “every journey is first of all a moment and a space of vacancy, a free space which suspends continuous time and places of order” (14). Utopia Island is almost a spatial escape from subjectivity, an exploration that both hoaxes early modern travelogues and uses them as a cover-up to filter contemporary reality. The flow at the heart of this early modern enterprise symbolizes the shifting of meaning on multiple levels: "letters moved, names moved (moving their meanings) – one card moved moving all the cards and actually finding none none – utopia as a process.” is the figure of all kinds of borders, moving, through the practice of his travels, all representations, secretly duplicating all kinds of real geographical travel and all kinds of historical and temporal change” (Marin 16). The ultimate fictional nature of the text exposes the fiction of the self created through travelogues – which have always been an integral part of the formation of the individual subject – whenever he sought to reclaim his individuality by describing and inventing others geographically disparate. It is not without reason that the ideas defended by Hythlodaeus in a half-polemical, half-prophetic voice undoubtedly surpass in terms of conviction everything that More produced elsewhere. More's diplomatic post as the quintessential Renaissance humanist ambassador situated him in a complex cultural crucible where his profession was a constant balance between stasis and flux, between "private philosophical meditation with public discourse and involvement in the civic world of politics and diplomacy. (Brotton 56), and what he proposes in Utopia can be seen more as a rhetorical exploration of a way out of his own subjectivity and also the emerging bourgeois ethos, than anything else. While More himself speaks in different voices by introducing real-life characters like John Morton, Peter Gilles and Thomas More, distorting and moving their characters, his Utopia.