From Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Visions of our - Chris J. Young

eliefs found in Judaism and Christianity. These visions culminate in 1516 in Thomas More’s Utopia.
Since More’s depiction of the imaginary society on the island of Utopia, writers have portrayed practical
societies that transform our economic, political, technological, and cultural models, and take us to
uncharted lands, distant planets, and unimaginable futures that challenge and alter the very foundations
of society. These utopian and dystopian visions imagine what our society could be like, and how we might
create such a place.
The word ‘utopia’ was coined by More as the name of the imaginary country he described in his short 1516
satire entitled Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reip. statu, deq; nova Insula Utopia.
The word Utopia is derived from the Greek words ouk, meaning not, which More reduces to u, and combines
with topos meaning place, to which he added the suffix ia, He created a word to indicate a particular place.
Etymologically, therefore, utopia is a place that is paradoxically a non-place, or basically no place, or nowhere.
Utopia has often been interpreted to signify a good place, through the confusion of its first syllable with the
Greek eu (as, for example, in ‘euphemism’ or ‘eulogy’). Utopia thus puns on eutopia to mean both no place
and good place simultaneously. The conflation first occurred in a poem More wrote to the reader entitled ‘A
short meter of Utopia’ in which Utopia is ‘righted’ to Eutopia, ‘a place of felicity’. As a result, the word utopia
came to refer to a non-existent good place, rather than to nowhere.
As a consequence of this conflation of meaning, the related word dystopia was invented in the nineteenth
century by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) during a parliamentary debate in the United Kingdom’s House of
Lords, where he described a bad place – the very antithesis of utopia. Dystopia is derived from the same root
as ‘utopia’ but with the prefix u being replaced with the Greek dys, meaning, bad, abnormal, or diseased.
in this exhibition ‘utopia’ is used synonymously with an imaginary good place or no place, as reflected in the
title to the exhibition, Nowhere, while ‘dystopia’ is used to mean a place diametrically opposed to Utopia.
What is a utopia or a dystopia?
What constitutes a utopia or dystopia? Does the imaginary Land of Cockaigne count as a utopia, where
cooked chickens walk into your mouth and boundless gallons of wine flow out of an everlasting fountain?
Should the apocalypse of World War Z be regarded as a dystopia, where the undead horde feasts on the
flesh of the living until there is nothing left? is the setting of Star Wars in a far away galaxy, as a utopian
state in a dystopian universe, where the rebellion struggles to repel the evil Galactic Empire? A utopia
or dystopia has to emerge from a functionally constructed society. New worlds, cities, or civilizations
may be founded upon futuristic technologies, republics, or faiths, but at its core there has to be a
materialist reality where society functions, not necessarily like the one familiar to us, but realistically
10 Introduction