Marx, Gurdjieff , and Mannheim: Contested Utopistics of Self and Society in a World-History Context

This presentation is more an exercise in theorizing history (in this case the dialectics of world-history and utopistic praxis) than in historiography, though I am not sure if the two can really be separated and dualized as such. My concern here is with contested identities (in a world-history context) of not just who we are, but who we can and should be. What attracted me to this panel topic was in fact the ways in which it could accommodate comparative and cross-disciplinary discourses of self and world on one hand and theory and practice on the other. Above all, however, from the standpoint of my applied sociological interest in comparative utopistics, it allowed me to problematize and historicize the taken-for-granted notion of "contestation" itself, questioning whether identities have to be contested, even if they have undoubtedly been so, throughout millennia. In what follows I will try to share with you in outline the argument advanced in my dissertation research titled "Mysticism and Utopia: Towards the Sociology of Self-Knowledge and Human Architecture" (Tamdgidi 2002). Therein, I have explored the utopistic theories of Karl Marx, G. I. Gurdjieff, and Karl Mannheim as contested efforts towards the good life in self and society within a world-historical framework. I argue that the three approaches--representing western utopian, eastern mystical, and academic movements--are fragmented microcosms of an otherwise singular creative human search for the good life. Their mutual alienations, I argue, are rooted in fragmented philosophical, religious, and scientific ideologies which have emerged in conjunction with the broad historical transitions of ancient civilizations to classical political, medieval cultural, and modern economic empires. Human architecture and the sociology of self-knowledge are then introduced as creative conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical efforts beyond the contested terrains of fragmented utopistics in favor of a just global society. "Utopistics" is a term recently coined by Immanuel Wallerstein denoting "the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgment as to the substantive rationality of alternative possible historical systems. It is the sober, rational, and realistic evaluation of human social systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity. Not the face of the perfect (and inevitable) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better, and historically possible (but far from certain) future. It is thus an exercise simultaneously in science, politics, and morality" (1998a 1-2). I use the concept with certain important qualifications, however. First, utopistics in my view must simultaneously deal with macro and micro processes, with broad structural concerns as well as everyday interactive issues. Second, it must eschew ethnocentrism and actively embrace comparative approaches across cultural traditions. Third, it must involve both rigorous assessment and actual application. Utopistics, in my view, is the comparative applied sociology (or historiography--reflective and creative) of the good life--of realistic seeking of optimally better selves, persons, communities, and worlds. The utopistic approach to applying sociology moves beyond either the mainstream or merely oppositional/antisystemic modes of resolving concrete everyday problems; it seeks positive self and social change by the example of its alternative methodological, theoretical, practical, and inspirational innovations and solutions. My purpose here is to use Marx, Gurdjieff, and Mannheim as representative doors for entering the stratified building rooms of theories we have inherited from modern or traditional, western or eastern, spacetimes, critically assessing their usefulness in helping us effectively move beyond our inner and broader social contestations and alienations in favor of the good life. I will conclude with my translation of another representative example from the mystical poetry of Rumi with a brief note on his poetic utopistics in a world-historical context--one in which the audience is simultaneously one's own selves, the face-to-face "others," and all future (and in remembrance all past) human generations. …