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Welcome to the On Paradise podcast series.

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I'm Paul Basu, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford

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and curator of ‘On Paradise: Between Hope and Memory’,

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an exhibition featuring the work of the artist Saad Qureshi

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at the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities in Oxford.

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‘On Paradise’ is part of ‘Utopia Now!’,

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a season of events that asks how we might live,

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imagine and create differently, and why

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imagining new futures matters now more than ever.

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As part of the exhibition, I spoke with Humanities

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scholars across the University who in different ways

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work on themes relating to Paradise and Utopia

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in different cultural and historical contexts.

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In this episode, we hear the reflections of Peter Boxall,

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Goldsmiths Professor of English... On Paradise.

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Hi, I’m Peter Boxall.

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I am a professor of English at New College in the University of Oxford,

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and I'm a historian of the novel and a literary critic,

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deeply invested in the possibilities of utopian thought and art.

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I have long-term research interests

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in the relation between literature and politics,

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largely in the modern and contemporary period,

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but also over the history of the novel as a form,

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and I have been working on utopia

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and utopian themes on and off

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for the last 40 years.

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It seems like an easy thing,

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but in fact it's really very hard to conceptualize Paradise.

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One of the recurrent problems about how to make pictures of Paradise

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is that Paradise fully formed would be very boring.

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What do you do if you've got everything you need?

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You sit around in togas eating grapes.

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That doesn't make for great art.

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So the the question any person

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who wants to make a picture of Paradise

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or of any utopia, the question they have to address

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is how you bring forms of perfection...

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Any paradisical landscape

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into a kind of contact with the world as it is,

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in a way that generates the drama of hope.

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The the danger of

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any pictures of Paradise, or any pictures of Utopia

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is that they fall into a kind of redundancy.

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Utopian thinking has got a very bad name, of course,

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because it seems like just wish-fulfillment and often deluded or

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politically naive or ineffective.

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So what I mean by the drama of hope is that you...

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The challenge for anyone thinking about Paradise

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politically and utopia politically

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is how to make a picture of how the world should be,

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whilst putting that picture into a kind of dynamic

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relation with the world as it is,

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so that hope is doing work, it's not simply

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relieving us of our problems or allowing us

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to fantasize about a perfect world.

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That's not that's not politically effective,

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and it's not aesthetically engaging.

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The great challenge for all thinkers of utopia,

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or Paradise, is how to imagine a threshold between

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the imperfect world that we

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live in and the forms that perfection might take.

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How to how to bring those two thought forms

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into contact with one another.

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The relation between Paradise and Utopia is

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is a very difficult one, and they are not interchangeable.

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One way of thinking about this would be to think about Thomas More's

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text, ‘Utopia’, from which the concept emerges.

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One of the most intriguing things about More's Utopia

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is that it's pure, pure hedonism.

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And if we know anything about Thomas More, we might know

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that he was an ascetic, devout Christian or a hair shirt.

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But his Utopians, when he sits down and imagines a perfect world,

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his Utopians are actually hedonists, and they live purely for pleasure,

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because what he's trying to imagine is a kind of Paradise

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where what we want to do

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and what we're obliged to do are one and the same thing.

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And it's one of the great radicalisms of Thomas More's Utopia

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that that he peoples it with pleasure seeking Epicureans.

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But the difference between Paradise and Utopia

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is that Thomas More's Christianity

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doesn't allow him to imagine that

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living in a utopia means that we no longer need an afterlife.

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We no longer need an immortal soul.

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So More conjures from his picture

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of Epicureans living in paradisical delight,

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a Christian framework of deferral of gratification,

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and in Utopia, failing to believe in the immortality of the soul

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is punishable by death, which is absolutely extraordinary

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when you think that it's a it's a epicurean delight.

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And that problem

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that More wants to give us a picture of hedonistic delight,

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but has to also have a picture of the afterlife.

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Is there in the problem of paradises

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at all times

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Because.

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Because Paradise is almost necessarily

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a perfection deferred, whereas utopia is a perfection realized.

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And anywhere we see Utopia and Paradise together,

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we see this tension between finding a way of achieving a utopia

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here in this world, and recognizing

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that Paradise is still to come.

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And wherever,

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wherever you see utopian thought forms, you see that problem.

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But they manifest themselves differently at different times,

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in different places and under different in different aesthetic mediums.

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Sculpture as a medium is very interesting to me from

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when thinking about both Utopia and Paradise.

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Some of the best thinkers of utopian thinkers of sculpture

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have tried to attend to this, that stone or the or a heavy material

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that you might sculpt with has to contain within itself

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this element of deferral, or of the not yet for it

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to be functioning as a utopian machine.

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Ernst Bloch, the great thinker of utopian sculptures, is brilliant at

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imagining how stone or a fixed, immobile sculptural entity

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might contain within it that feeling of time

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still to come or possibility still to come.

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And this works differently when we're in various

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theological environments.

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I mean, a most iconography has some connection with

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or some comparison or some relation between what's here

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and can be touched and felt and what's deferred to the afterlife.

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It's there in most iconography, but I think it's there

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in a, as in a, in a sense, in all statutory and sculpture.

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That sense that the thing is here, but it's still also gesturing

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beyond itself.

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From a, from a secular

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standpoint, which is my own standpoint,

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what both origins and ends

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are necessary when thinking about

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not only utopia and Paradise, but the

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the capacity for artworks to make,

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to generate the feeling of meaning.

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There's a great line in a in a novel by George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.

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It opens, Daniel Deronda, with the line

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‘Mankind cannot do without the make believe of a beginning’,

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A wonderful, wonderful line.

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Typically Eliotian or typical of George Eliot

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in that it starts the novel off so it performs itself as a beginning,

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whilst also recognizing that all beginnings

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are somehow fantastical,

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non-existent in the way that I've been thinking about

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Paradise as something that is either deferred or

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or before the beginning.

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And all beginnings have this have this characteristic

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of being somewhat unimaginable.

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Try to imagine the beginning of something.

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Then you have to...

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In order to do that, you have to imagine the time

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before the beginning from which the beginning emerged, which any child

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trying to think about the beginning of the universe gets completely

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nonplused by.

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Theological structures tend to incorporate the beginning

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as a moment of originary,

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sacred generative possibility

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performed by a Godhead, just as after

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the end is recuperated under most theological signs

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by a picture of an afterlife or a Paradise where history is over

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and everything's sorted out.

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If you if you're speaking from a secular standpoint

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where those origins and those end points

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don't have a doctrine to establish themselves with

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or to find themselves embedded in, then

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the artwork is really given the task

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of making the possibility of the origin

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and the possibility of the end thinkable

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without prescribing a doctrine

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to give it shape.

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So if you're speaking from a secular standpoint, there is no moment

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where the Godhead starts things off

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and there is no moment where where we all sit around eating grapes.

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I don't mean to be disrespectful. No.

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That's disrespectful.

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Where there's no moment where we achieve our final form.

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But we know that these things are necessary.

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Beginnings and ends are necessary for all thinking to take place.

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So how do you make the space available

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to imagine an origin?

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How do you make the space available to imagine an end?

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If you don't have the doctrine to to make that concrete?

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As many people will know, the etymology of Utopia is is no place.

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It's it's wired in even when we're even

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for More thinking about this from a Christian standpoint,

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utopia is wired in as something that doesn't happen,

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that the origin doesn't happen,

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the end doesn't happen, but it's nevertheless given a place.

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That's the etymology, nothingness in place, brought together

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in order to allow us to extend

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meaningfully backwards and forwards in time.

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How do we imagine hope

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when we don't know what we are hoping for?

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That's a absolutely central problem for all,

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all utopian thought forms.

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If we if we don't know what the beginning is,

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and if we don't know what the end is,

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we don't know what would make us complete.

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So hoping has to take place.

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In the absence of knowing what you're hoping for,

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there's a need for hope in the world

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that we're living in, a desperate need for hope,

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in the quite broad recognition

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that how we fix the world that we're living in

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is a tough nut to crack.

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Now, that takes one particular form in our contemporary moment,

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but it is built in to the principle of hope

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that it takes place in a negative fashion.

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And it's our political task and our political responsibility

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to find ways of

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responding to a hope that that doesn't know,

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it doesn't speak in its own language, and finding

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practical political changes

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and evolutions and revolutions that can be inspired by that hope,

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even in the knowledge that it's that it doesn't know what it is

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longing for.

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Unless, of course,

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you're working

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within a doctrinal situation where you do know what you want.

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But for many of us, that's not the case, that we couldn't encapsulate

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what a what a perfect world is like.

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We experience hope negatively because

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we're trying to work our way towards better worlds.

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In the absence of a fully revealed concept of what

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justice, ethics, or the good is or are.

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Pictures of Paradise often return us to a state of nature.

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Rousseau does. William Blake does.

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His Songs of Innocence and Experience, tend

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to think of urban places and lived realities

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as irredeemably fallen, and his Songs of Experience

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give us pictures of natural spaces that are uncontaminated by humans.

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I suppose there's a strong tendency to imagine

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that a perfect world would be a world without us in it.

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That's certainly there, in Rousseau's pictures of picture

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of states of nature.

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And there's a strong feeling that

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to achieve a kind of purity or a kind of perfection,

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we would have to go back to an

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uncontaminated natural space.

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And for for many environmentalists and and thinkers of the eco-crisis,

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the challenge is how to imagine a world, a natural world

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that hasn't been corrupted by human activity.

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The more interesting challenge

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is how to work through this period of industrialization,

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towards a future where we can live in a better balance with the planet,

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where where nature and culture can adapt

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to one another,

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rather than simply imagining our extinction as the only way

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of her correcting the damage that we've done.

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And there are many.

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There are many thinkers now

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trying to find the conceptual apparatuses

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that would allow us to look past what we might think of as a

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towards a post extractive

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relation of the human to the planet

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and to nature.

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The extremity of the crises

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that we're in now in terms of

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not only geopolitical crisis, but environmental crisis,

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requires us to think the world very differently.

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The the languages we have

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democratic shared life,

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the languages we have for imagining our relation to the planet.

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They have seriously expired

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and that expiry is making itself felt everywhere today.

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So the challenge for us

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is how to radically reconceive the languages that we have

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and allow us to see and inhabit the world.

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The utopian logic is that is that in order to make that change,

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we have to be able to imagine

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a no place, a world that doesn't yet exist.

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Now that in some ways can feel politically demotivating,

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because we can't go about making a world that doesn't exist.

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Or we can, but it's not.

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It's going to be purely imaginary.

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The the utopian challenge is

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to set our own conceptual apparatuses aside,

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to imagine that that requires us to see

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into a non-conceptualized future,

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whilst at the same time building the

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the kind of languages and the kind of pragmatic net zero

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environments that will allow us to slowly work

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towards a world that we haven't yet got a language for.

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That's a very delicate kind of operation

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and one that has sometimes worked.

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If you think about the birth of the welfare state in the UK

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after the Second World War,

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there was a need to reinvent how we relate to one another.

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People that were able to set aside a set of existing

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social relations

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in order to achieve that, and the kind of political imagination

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that made the pragmatic and practical building of a new state possible.

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We always need these combinations, the

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the utopian investment in the world that isn't yet here,

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the pragmatic capacity

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to build towards it, which is itself a sculptural logic.

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The utopian thinking, Paradisiacal thinking

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is about bringing the

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the art of the possible,

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what we can imagine into contact with the not yet possible

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to produce new pictures of being in the world.

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I read the Utopia as a teenager.

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At the same time, I was first becoming entranced by

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first the drama and then the prose of Samuel Beckett

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and Samuel Beckett is not often thought

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of as a utopian thinker.

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He's very often thought of as the poet of despair and gloom,

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but I think it's quite common to experience

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these two things, Utopia and Beckett, together.

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If you read if you read Beckett as a teenager,

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because he frees you from

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the world as you're trying to live it.

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If you're 16, which is I have a 16

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year old myself now I can see how

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how tough adjusting to this

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kind of lumpen and recalcitrant world is.

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You read, you read Beckett, and you realize that it can just go away.

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The world can can, can disappear.

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Two men waiting by a tree.

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It's...

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Which is how most people come to Beckett for the first time.

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Waiting for Godot.

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You know, you're waiting for this meaning

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that's going to come along and ain't ever going to arrive.

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That doesn't make you feel gloomy as a...

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It didn't make me feel gloomy as a 16 year old.

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It made me realize the world as a as an unwritten text,

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as Utopia makes you realize that. The heart of Utopia

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is a discussion between a fictional version of Thomas More

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and an imaginary person called Raphael Hythloday,

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whose name means nonsense.

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And in this conversation between More, the statesman, and Hythloday,

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the Utopian, we have exactly that moment that you

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that you see

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in Waiting for Godot, when you read it

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for the first time as a teenager.

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If you're lucky enough

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to have that experience, where you realize the world as it is, meets

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the world as it isn't or is not yet, and in that combination,

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freedom happens.

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And and certainly for me, that was my first real, proper,

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powerful experience of what aesthetics does.

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The picture of the world that we're given when we're experiencing

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an aesthetic moment is also a picture of the world that isn't yet here.

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I mean, that's maybe the definition of aesthetic representation.

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And to that extent, I think, I think I come to the conclusion

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I've thought about this a lot.

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I think I come to the conclusion that all aesthetic representation

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has a utopian dimension.

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Pictures of Paradise

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that we have available through various iconography

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have an amazing power, even

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for those of us who aren't believers

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in the face that iconography supports.

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So Christian iconography.

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To take an example, Christian pictures of Paradise

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are enormously powerful to me,

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even though I have no Christian faith

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and I spend a lot of my time in churches and cathedrals

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because I love the artworks they contain.

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And I think this is because

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pictures of Paradise produced by faith

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are themselves productive of the good, and they contain

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what I've been trying to articulate, which is that that sense

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that that the world, the things of this world,

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contain a futurity within them.

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When you're when you feel moved or prayerful.

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I have no faith, but I often feel prayerful

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when you're moved or feel prayerful in the presence

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of iconography, of religious iconography,

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you're being ushered into this knowledge

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that the world is not all that is the case.

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The quote, Wittgenstein.

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That the world contains a futurity within it.

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I have enormous respect for all faiths, for striving

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to give a language to that possibility and that futurity.

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And for me personally, its power,

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the power of futurity, lies in its being undisclosed.

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But when I'm when I'm in the presence of a iconography

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which discloses to its believers what that futurity is,

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I feel moved by it rather than excluded by it.

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In this discussion so far, we've been thinking about Paradise

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as a very abstract entity, and Utopia is an abstract entity.

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It would be wrong to to think of this

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in such abstract terms, and it would be wrong, in my view,

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also to think of Utopia

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only in its extreme form, because we experience

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spaces and moments of life

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all the time that contains something like

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a utopian pleasure within them.

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I'm speaking to you from a university that has colleges

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dotted around the city that I hear every day

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that people walk into Worcester College or New College quad,

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and they say, this is Paradise, because

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architectural shaping, the cultivation of gardens,

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things that we, if we're lucky enough to be in a university

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or if we're lucky enough to have a garden, things that we experience every day

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do bring this coming together of a perfection

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and an imperfection into into our everyday lives.

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And all all university campuses

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have, to me, the feeling of being partially realized utopias

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where the where the possibility of thinking

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and the reality of living somehow coexist.

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Thank you for listening to this episode of the On Paradise podcast series.

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Please explore other episodes by searching for On Paradise

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at podcasts.ox.ac.uk.

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Goodbye.