I
A metallic fanfare is followed by a shimmering electronic glissando. The effect is artificial, alien and remote – like a star breaking apart. By contrast, the male announcer’s voice sounds familiar and warm. ‘Futurama! General Motors Futurama at the New York World’s Fair where you meet the future face to face!’ This short promotional item has been produced by Manhattan Research, a division of Raymond Scott Enterprises Incorporated. ‘It’s an experience you will never forget,’ the voice insists, ‘because the fantastic Futurama ride takes you into the future and makes you feel like you are there – in outer space, beneath the sea, in unbelievable places watching believable things happen.’
II
Utopia has always been a destination beyond which there is nothing. ‘Many of the futuristic things you will see are already more than just a part of the General Motors Futurama exhibit,’ the voice announces, as an electronic glissando slides into silence. ‘They are demonstration models, in a sense, for scientific ideas being developed now. Stroll down our Avenue of Progress and see this kind of product on display – and also the exciting array of new products in our Product Plaza.’ By
the time Scott composes this promotional item for the General Motors Futurama pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, he has devised similar electronic pitches for Sprite, Auto-Lite Spark Plugs, Nescafé and Vick’s Medicated Cough Drops. ‘At the Fair, see General Motors Futurama first,’ the announcer urges. ‘Take the trip that’s worth the trip to the Fair – it’s free!’
III
The price of admission to the 1964 New York World’s Fair is $2.00 for an adult and $1.00 for every child under twelve years of age: the same tickets would cost around ten times that today. The 2015 Milan World’s Fair cost $35.00 per adult and half that amount for children.
IV
Secure at first food and clothing, Then shall the Kingdom of God be granted to you.
– Hegel, 1807
Utopia is both the domination of nature taken to extremes and an unflinching inability to confront the everyday world. Utopia consequently presents itself as a series of satirical spaces – its origins are less important than its connections with our understanding of history. Any possible utopia is always located in the past – if only because it must establish a language in order to exist. As with the idealistic Fourier, the libertine Sade and the agitator Blanquis, its carefully phrased arguments conceal a divisive inner drive towards mockery. Accordingly, utopia remains an unfettered parody based upon an already tragic premise.
V
Television commercials show happy consumers reacting in surprised passivity as drinks are fixed, cigarettes lit and ashtrays moved by unseen hands – this is at a time when Raymond Scott is offering a range of ‘electronic’ goods and services to his customers, including ‘Electronic Cocktail Glass’, ‘Electronic Cigarette Case’ and ‘Ash Tray With Accompanying Electronic Music Score’.
VI
For those visiting the 1964 New York World’s Fair, utopia is an electronic delirium that operates in a fast and inflexible manner, barely allowing for any reaction time. A civilization built entirely upon novelties appears to have come into existence overnight. Consumer items offer themselves as their own conclusion: ecstatic moments of oblivion. ‘Now look what they’ve gone and done!’ a housewife exclaims at the start of a commercial for Vim detergent, her choice of words suggesting a similar state of surprised passivity, as if suddenly confronted with the future for the very first time.
VII
Think of the darkness and the great cold
In this valley, which resounds with misery.
– Brecht, Threepenny Opera
The largest structure at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, dominating one entire corner of the Transportation Area, is General Motors’ Futurama – ‘one of the most eye-catching at the Fair,’ according to the official guide. The building’s design ‘is keynoted by an enormous slanting canopy 110 feet high, balanced by some architectural legerdemain, over the entrance to the exhibit area.’ This sleekly futuristic facade rises like a raked tailfin over the 90,000 visitors queuing daily to take their free trip to utopia. A fascinating close-up look at the future, according to The World’s Fair Official Guide, it offers ‘a foretaste of lunar commuting, Antarctic ice ports, moving sidewalks and vacation resorts under the oceans.’ Futurama is a ride in every sense of the word: ‘visitors sit in individual plastic contour seats equipped with speakers that supply a narration,’ the Guide specifies. ‘The seats move along a track that alternatively dips and climbs through the two floors of the exhibition hall.’ A two-page spread supplied by General Motors is even more specific. ‘Are you ready?’ it asks. ‘Well, then, let’s go! That chair you’re seated in is moving…moving into the future.’
VIII
Futurama presents itself as a passive experience. The chair whisks spectators through a succession of intricately staged dioramas showing scenes of the future. ‘A trip to the moon starts the ride,’ the Guide enthuses, ‘taking the visitor past a scale model whose craters and canyons are dotted with “lunar crawlers” and commuter space ships.’ Imagine a vision of tomorrow’s world that begins with a trip to the moon and moves on from there.
IX
My wing is ready to fly
I would like to turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, ‘Angelic Greetings’
A 26-minute public relations film distributed by General Motors in 1965 under the title Fair Today Futurama Tomorrow contains a version of the ride as experienced by a twelve-year-old blond boy. Through his eyes we witness a global weather monitoring station, where human operators sit at imposing computer consoles, and powerful lasers cutting down trees in the Amazonian rain forests to make way for a giant motorway. NBC’s Edwin Newman remarks that ‘my own feeling was the Fair was not really futuristic – at least it did not represent any future city I would find agreeable. If it was futuristic, it was in a comic book way.’
X
Utopia marks a fragmentation point – nothing coherent can survive it. Like sex, violence and death, it cannot be contained by current discourse. And, like oblivion, utopia ultimately constitutes a negative condition: a space bounded by discontent. Following the logic of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, technology becomes a key element in the establishing of utopia, first by correcting nature and then by displacing it. Meanwhile utopia maintains a jagged presence as a jumble of texts and images ripped from the future and drawn into a series of impossible demands.
XI
Walt Disney teams up with General Motors’ main rival Ford to present the ‘Magic Skyway’ in which visitors can ride in a brand-new convertible past prehistoric scenes of animatronic dinosaurs and cavemen before accelerating rapidly into the future. ‘In twelve minutes,’ Newman observes, ‘you cover several million years of history – and it’s good fun.’ A long transparent tunnel running over a section of pedestrian walkway takes the cars in and out of the Ford pavilion as if connecting the World’s Fair directly to this science-fiction scenario. Ford’s Magic Skyway and General Motors’ Futurama are both museums dedicated to preserving a culture that has yet to exist. There is only one future, they announce to its visitors, and you are seeing it right now. A utopian fantasy is being presented here with all the force of a hallucination. However speculative this experience might appear, and however optimistic the vistas presented to the public, it inevitably speaks of the future in the past tense. Life magazine dismisses the Fair as ‘all candy-bright and gay in a world that is in fact harsh’ and where East and West confront each across a deepening nuclear divide. In opposition to Cold War uncertainty, the New York World’s Fair reveals itself as the formal expression in words, images and shapes of a utopia that has already happened. ‘And visit our Product Plaza to see why today’s a pretty exciting time in history, too,’ General Motors reminds readers from the pages of the Official Guide.
XII
We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled idlers in the garden of knowledge.
– Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
According to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, utopia is essentially an automated environment. Simultaneously scattered and cohesive, open and directed, its attractions break up the visual continuity of space into multiple pathways and sites: no single vantage point can possibly make sense of it all. This, it could be argued, is one reason why its pavilions and rides work so well on commercial television with its endless advertising breaks and interruptions for news updates and messages from sponsors. ‘People hardly know where to begin when they step into the Fair,’ observes the narrator in Ford’s Magic Skyway promotional film.
XIII
Yet every day our cause becomes clearer, and the people get smarter.
– Josef Dietzgen, Social Democratic Philosophy
Many visitors to the 1939 New York World’s Fair purchased lapel pins bearing the legend ‘I have seen the future’, locating the moment neatly in the past tense. Utopia is a thread to be followed, leading us from Thomas More’s early modern ‘nowhere’, via the social architecture of Buckminster Fuller, to the postmillennial values of Silicone Valley. Visitors passing through the Futurama ride in 1964 also receive a souvenir clip that says ‘I have seen the future’: a reminder that there was a General Motors Futurama ride on the same patch of ground at the ’39 Fair, portraying life in the year 1960. Events depicted in the ’64 update take place sixty years ahead – in 2024.
XIV
Origin is the end
– Karl Kraus, Words in Verse vol.1
The 1964 New York World’s Fair opens six months after the assassination of John F Kennedy, followed by the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. Television advertising and light entertainment programs are taken off the air during an extended period of national mourning. By the time the Fair opens, the networks are gearing up their fall schedules. ABC has two new shows premiering within twenty-four hours of each other: Bewitched on Thursday September 17 and Jonny Quest on Friday September 18. Located closely together in the schedules, their narratives offer essentially the same take on utopia’s automated environment.
XV
A cartoon adventure for ‘children and the entire family’, Jonny Quest takes place in an exclusionary male world. Eleven-year-old Jonny never seems to have known his mother – she is not even a name to him. He lives on a private island with two fathers: Dr Benton Quest, a research scientist, and ‘Race’ Bannon, a secret service operative. ‘You see, if Jonny fell into the hands of enemy agents, Dr Quest’s value to science would be seriously impaired,’ an agency operative explains. On Jonny’s island, the kitchen has been replaced by a laboratory, where Dr Quest’s computer ‘Eunice’ provides the only female presence. Who would've believed it!
They say that,
Angered by the passing of each hour,
The new Joshuas
At the foot of each clocktower
Fired at the dials
To make the day stand still.
XVI
In Bewitched a young witch marries a ‘mortal’ husband. Even before their wedding, Samantha and Darrin are a presented as a typical 1960s American couple. ‘They found they had a lot of interests in common,’ an unseen narrator reveals as they make out in various locations, ‘…radio, television, trains…’ Darrin makes Samantha renounce magic. ‘You’re going to have to learn to be a normal suburban housewife,’ he insists. Meanwhile, Samantha exists in a permanent commercial for household products and appliances. A messy kitchen is instantly set in order, thanks to the kind of televisual trickery that transforms domestic drudgery into something close to magic. Samantha is utopia’s automated environment personified.
XVII
The sponsor’s message at the end of Bewitched shows cartoon versions of Darrin and Samantha riding on her broomstick, courtesy of Chevrolet – a division of General Motors. Utopia’s shape and form remain spectral; and, like all specters, their effects are immediate, insinuating and misleading. Magic and technology are frequently confused with each other for purely cultural reasons – it has little to do with hierarchies of thought. The counterpart to Samantha’s Chevrolet broomstick is Jonny Quest’s ‘decoder ring’ given away with any two pairs of PF Flyers, a line of sneakers manufactured by the show’s sponsors. A piece of futuristic technology that slips onto a finger, it occupies the same narrative space as the jetpacks and bazookas, robot spiders and supersonic jets featured in the show. The term ‘futuristic’ seems badly dated in this context – so does ‘modernity’ – and so too does ‘utopia’.
XVIII
Utopia must shatter thought, language and gesture in the same way that the final outcome of an alchemic working must shatter the glass vessel that contains it. The process takes place not within but beyond the equipment supplied – in an entirely different dimension altogether.
Addendum
A
The prospects before humanity, as presented by Buckminster Fuller in 1969, remain clear: Utopia or Oblivion. In discovering and recovering the body, the hidden aim of all technology is to become indistinguishable from nature. Expressed in utopian terms, it magically changes the sensual life of the human animal into an advanced (that is to say, primal) form of social architecture.
B
The true purpose of utopia is to establish an environment in which everyone can run wild. Stripped of all pretence and representation, humanity returns to a condition of biological innocence. Utopia’s innocence, however, remains that of an animal licking the blood off its teeth. By comparison, oblivion is relatively trustworthy – you always know where you are with oblivion.
Ken Hollings
London January/February 2023