For me (waxing maximally Utopian), it's a dream of the end of Business and Busywork and the beginning of Free Time: the only Utopia worth dreaming. (Come revolution, composition courses will be abolished & papers left ungraded.) William Morris said in "Useful Work and Useless Toil":
***** And yet if there be any work which cannot be made other than repulsive, either by the shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness (and therefore honour) in the mind of the man who performs it freely -- if there by any work which cannot be but a torment to the worker, what then? Well, then, let us see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it undone, for it were better that they should. The produce of such work cannot be worth the price of it. *****
Oscar Wilde, of course, concurs:
***** Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organize labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. _The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful_. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been...the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably...a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery..._At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man_....
...Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias. ("The Soul of Man under Socialism") *****
It is a tragedy for humanity that none of the formerly and still existing socialist countries were allowed to develop in peace, without being besieged by imperial powers, and got around to making work short, humane, and attractive. But Morris's and Wilde's secular Utopias are worth commemorating in this age of TINA, a sad aftermath of the massacre of dreams and dreamers, when many protests against alienation are once again expressed in the anachronistic forms of Luddism, Survivalism, Black & Green Primitivism.
As for Foucault and power, Marshall Sahlins, for example, has this to say:
***** "A man of a thousand masks," one of his biographers said of Michel Foucault, so how seriously can we take the guise he assumed to say that power arises in struggle, in war, and such a war as is of every man against every man. "Who fights whom?" he asked. "We all fight each other." Critics and exegetes hardly notice Foucault's connection to Hobbes except to mention the apparently radical disclaimer that his own notion of power is "the exact opposite of Hobbes' project in _Leviathan_." We have to give up our fascination with sovereignty, "cut off the king's head," free our attention from the repressive institution of state. Power comes from below. It is invested in the structures and cleavages of everyday life, omnipresent in quotidian regimes of knowledge and truth. If in the Hobbesian contract subjects constitute the power, the Commonwealth that keeps them all in awe, in the Foucauldian schema power constitutes the subjects. All the same, the structuralism the later Foucault abandoned for a sense of the poly-amorphous perverse, this structuralism taught that opposites are things alike in all significant respects but one. So when Foucault speaks of a war of each against all, and in the next breath even hints of a Christian divided self -- "And there is always within each of us something that fights something else" -- we are tempted to believe that he and Hobbes have more in common than the fact that, with the exception of Hobbes, both were bald. (_Waiting for Foucault_ 37-8) *****
>I have no interest in becoming a Christian, or any kind of religion,
>though I will confess I haven't completely shaken the aesthetic
>appeal of Catholic ritual and imagery. I think Zizek's right that
>Christianity has contributed to a notion of social transformation.
>It's had many noxious influences too. I don't have a problem with
>things having contradictory influences, do you?
Sartre said something similar about Marx and Kierkegaard. As Carrol says, there is nothing new in bourgeois thought, though it is still driven by the watchword of modernism and accumulation: "Make It New." Wilde also had a wild interpretation of Christianity and Hellenism (finer and more compatible with Marxism than Sartre's and Zizek's views of the soul under Christianity), and here goes the best part:
***** A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows authority to be evil, and who welcomes all pain, because through that he realizes his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said, no scheme for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.
Nor will man miss it. _For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life_. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realize completey, because they had slaves, and starved them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realize except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The new Individualism is the new Hellenism. *****
No doubt Zizek and his fellow theorists of Radical Evil will dismiss Wilde as a Socialist Romantic who unwittingly practiced the sin of dreaming the earthly realization of Good, Truth, and Happiness (a dreadful prospect of the Tyranny of the Majority raises its head in the minds of Late Modernist Wannabe Christains when they hear a note of Socialist Romanticism -- they can doubtlessly discover a seed of Stalinism in Morris and Wilde!). My main objection to late modern culture warriors is that they are all crabby, as crabby as the hateful T.S. Eliot's Old Men in the Unreal City and the Waste Land (even Nietzsche looks finer in comparison to his late modern heirs). In contrast, Morris and Wilde had the courage to risk sounding ridiculous and to propose Beauty and Free Development for All. Two clits up!!!
Yoshie