The Superstudio Manifesto - a Utopian Dream for Humanity - Essay Example

The Superstudio manifesto is a call for liberation from these systems.  Rooted in anarchist ideals, it celebrates the power of the individual as opposed to the State and calls for radical freedom to explore, to question and to create.

Is this vision utopian or dystopian?  Let us first define the terms.  A utopia is an ideal society, in which war, poverty, slavery, and possibly even sickness and death have been banished from the world.  In it, people live peacefully, equitably and symbiotically with each other, each maximizing his or her full potential while engaging in voluntary, mutually satisfying relationships with others. 

A dystopia is a dark mirror image of the utopian ideal.  The word represents a society where inequality, slavery and warfare are not simply aberrations or defects but rather unavoidable facts of everyday life.  Human freedom is extinguished or severely restricted, information is tightly controlled, and individual well is sacrificed to advance the agenda of malevolent central authority.

The key to understanding why the Superstudio manifesto is utopian is to first realize that a dystopia, as described above, is nothing more than a totalitarian’s idea of a perfect society.  To Hitler, his regime wasn’t vile cancer.  Instead, it was an ideal social formation that liberated people from the nihilistic purposelessness of their lives and congregated them around a noble mission, allowing them to find fulfillment in abject submission and endless servitude to the State.

But the dictator’s dream is a horrid nightmare to the common man, who wishes only to pursue his own interests, and provide for his own welfare, without being used as a chattel to fulfill another man’s vision.  This realization is at the heart of the Superstudio manifesto.  It rightly exposes modernist notions as the farce that they are.  Industrialization, consumerism and corporatism herd people together, cattle-like, into factories, shopping malls, and sterile, bland housing developments.  In such atmospheres, conformity is the norm and novelty is anathema.

The manifesto, in decrying architecture’s complicity in this movement, points the way to an alternative future for humanity.  In it, the individual is liberated from illusory obligations to the government and to the capitalist taskmaster. 

In his or her own private space, persons are free to create, meditate, conceive and produce in accordance with their own radically free, self-conceived paradigms.  There is no inducement to follow prevailing fashion trends, to model one’s clothing or one’s home or one’s thinking after the prevailing trend. 

In such a world no dictator can arise to destroy liberty in the name of his own twisted vision of the future. This is the promise and the goal of the manifesto and is why it is utopian in its themes.  I offer no gods, no masters, and no limits to freedom.