Blueprints for change: navigating a way through utopian visions and vocabularies

Abstract

In her presentation to the 11th Symposium of Gastronomy, held in Hobart 1999, Gay Bilson interpreted the nominated theme – the Pursuit of Happiness from Colony to Republic – in terms of Utopian ideals. Anticipating the turning millennium, it seemed likely to her that upheavals caused by globalism, new technologies and the push for republicanism would ‘produce a plethora of new utopian ideas and essays’ intent on articulating solutions to existing social and economic problems - for surely, ‘utopias are by nature commentaries on present societies’ (Bilson, 1999). Sadly, as history indicates, the republic is no longer immanent, and despite some interjections, discourses of utopianism continue to be conceived as ‘hopelessly’ focused on reaching ‘far-off goals in a distant future where all our problems will finally be solved’ (Massumi, 2002). In keeping with the theme of this year’s symposium, this paper seeks to retrieve the arguments so carefully developed by Gay as she sought to weave together the seminal texts of Charles Fourier and Michael Symons, with a side-serving of Roland Barthes. Her objective was not to explain each, but to illuminate their convergences; a shared conviction in gastronomic pleasures as pivotal to creating a better society, girded by a shared passion for systematic organisation and a tendency to proselytise. Similarly, this paper seeks to illuminate what I suggest are related, yet unrecognised, present day convergences (and contradictions) for present-day utopias - in this instance, the interwoven narratives of moral economy, a crisis of trust, and strategies for social change.