Communication and the Construction of the Ideal in the West

This dissertation examines the conceptualization of the ideal society in Western culture in relation to changes in communication modes. The utopian discourse is defined by a concern with the relationship between language and reality. I explore this concern as a reflection of the theoretical disposition invited by changes in communication modes, which are perceived as crises of representation. Plato and Thomas More’s enlightened communities in the Republic and Utopia reflect comparable idealistic perspectives on education. In my view, this optimism stems from the social reality of growing literacies with the advent of the alphabet and printing, respectively. I contend that these writers are animated by an ethical impulse to teach their readers that language is representation. From the vantage point of this knowledge, each individual may employ language symbolically in order to create and perpetuate a moral and spiritual mode of thought. I argue that the discourse of the ideal is the symbolic expression of humanity’s engagement with death, the ultimate existential concern made acute by the aspect of historical discontinuity in the crisis of representation. Plato and More exhibit comparable efforts to open to their readers the superior space of critical reflexivity which they themselves inhabit. From this conceptual, pre-representational space of conscious choice, language is subjected to achieving spiritual progress. I introduce the concept of post-utopia, which describes a pragmatic moment when the relationship between author and the ideal society is brought into the foreground and reinforced as a way of addressing concerns with textual authority. I examine these developments in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, François Rabelais’s episode of the Abbaye de Thélème in Gargantua, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. These authors draw on the ideologies of representation inherent in utopian discourse, and position the authorial figure as link between scriptural teleology and history, ensuring spiritual and societal betterment in the textual cultures of late antiquity and early modernity. The figure of the author emerges as a symbol of history and of man’s ability to assume the limits of the mind and of language.Ph