(see Version 1.1 of this card)
When the lines of telesthesia — telegraph, telephone, telecommunications — connect topics into a topographic space, extensively mapped and storied, utopia is recruited out of the page and comes out to play. Utopia uncoils, spreading its tendrils out of the book, along the lines of the topographic, into the world. Rather than a retreat from the world, showing in its positive creation of a new world what the actual one beyond its line lacks, utopia becomes something else. The book becomes an alibi for more worldly lines of communication, some with the power of an order: diagrams, memos, reports, telegrams. Utopia becomes part of something instrumental, but thereby loses its power. Topographic lines are there now to make the world over by the book, but in the process they make the book over as well, reducing it to just another line. The smooth plane of the blank page is the green-fields site for delineating a pure topography of the line. But that page could be any page — a page of a novel or of Eichmann’s orders. Utopia’s problem is not that it is self contained, but that it is not self contained enough. Signs and images leak out of this bound-paper enclave, and are captured by other powers, connected to flows along other lines.
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