Crafting Experience: William Morris, John Dewey, and Utopia

Utopian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2011 Copyright © 2011. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

Crafting Experience: William Morris, John Dewey, and Utopia

John Freeman−Moir

abstract

In different yet resonating ways both William Morris and John Dewey turned their attention to utopian experience as everyday making and doing. Dewey developed a holistic analysis of human action that contains intimations of utopia as well as a critique of fractured experience. Morris is well known for his vivid picture of utopia as life lived artfully. Comparisons have been noted between Morris and Dewey but not explored in detail. This article looks at Morris’s view of utopian experience from the perspective of Dewey’s pragmatist understanding of action, habit, and artful experience. It is argued that the craft of experience is an idea central to the utopian thinking of Morris and Dewey.

Introduction

Utopian experience emerges within the daily milieu of the utopian commu-nity as answers are given to the question, “How shall we live then?”1 As the title of a lecture in 1889 this was William Morris’s question, but it might just

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as easily have been John Dewey’s. The question has no definite boundary. It admits of no once-and-forever answer. Approached pragmatically, utopia acknowledges the contingent and the provisional in human affairs. Utopian experience is crafted from “things with which [we are] familiar, simple things . . . recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day. . . . All drawn with admirable simplicity and excellent design—all a unity.”2 This is the claim to be examined.

Even blueprints of “perfect” societies, of which the history of utopia-nism is replete, play tribute to this pragmatic point. Flights of fantasy invari-ably have their origins in the quotidian. And we can choose, as architects regularly do, to view blueprints as less than an expression of the perfect. They can more usefully be understood as thought experiments, hypotheses, or metaphors addressing the question, “What say the world was something like this?” Furthermore, any utopian construction is subject to the pragmatic virtue of fallibilism.

Strictures against using blueprints in utopian thinking have been deliv-ered regularly and sternly and usually accompanied with warnings about authoritarianism. At times, scholars sympathetic to utopianism have seemed too defensive in responding to these criticisms. A more recent emphasis on understanding utopia as method or process is to be welcomed, and as part of this, blueprints still have an important role to play.3 Utopians need ends-in-view of what is desirable and feasible, and these constitute pictures in some sense. But more elaborate pictures, fantasies even, are not necessarily without merit and should not be summarily dismissed. As Robert Nozick has pragmatically advised:

One should not be too quick, here or elsewhere, with such fanta-sies. For they reveal much about our condition. One cannot know how satisfied we shall be with what we achieve among our feasible alternatives without knowing how far they diverge from our fanta-sised wishes. . . . Even the wildest hopes and predictions express . . . pangs and a longing whose omission from a portrait of us leaves it merely three dimensional. I do not laugh at the content of our wishes that go not only beyond the actual and what we take to be feasible in the future, but even beyond the possible.4


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In Human Nature and Conduct Dewey announced his intention to bring “morals to earth, and if they still aspire to heaven it is to the heavens of the earth, and not to another world.”5 Morris and Dewey both insisted that it is our earth and not some transcendentally imposed or “spiritualized” world that we are grappling with. And yet, it remains an open question as to what the heavens of the earth can be democratically designed and crafted to be. How they come to look will depend on actions imaginatively projected and undertaken. Dewey found a central place in his social theory for the tool of intelligent and creative action; “the function of the mind is to project new and more complex ends—free from routine and caprice . . . to liberate and liber-alize action, is the pragmatic lesson.”6 With Edward Bellamy’s Looking Back in mind, Morris, the libertarian socialist, objected to formulaic blueprints as mechanically routine and cramping. But, as News from Nowhere shows, he had no objection in principle to vividly detailed pictures of utopia. He practiced the idea of utopian imagination as a necessary part of the struggle for social-ism. Between the dead ends of routine and caprice both Morris and Dewey found ways to think about the craft of utopian experience by reference to situated events, actions, and things, making and doing. What follows is an exploration of this idea.

Morris and Dewey—each radical in his thinking about art, work, democ-racy, and education—explored ways of living that each regarded as more desirable than that which capitalist civilization can provide for and that each thought might be realizable. Neither contended that utopia means unalloyed happiness or the end of history. Outcomes cannot be guaranteed, and the role of accident, suffering, and tragedy must be taken into account. In this respect, an evident antiauthoritarianism and modesty marks out their under-standing of experience. Morris (1834–1896, artist and pattern designer) and Dewey (1859–1952, philosopher and educationist) both understood that life is a matter of experimentation, of looking outward and to the future, even when, as in Morris’s case, images of the utopian future draw on the medi-eval past. The past for Morris and Dewey was understood as a resource for enriching and securing the present as a step toward a better future. Each, committed to the truth of craftsmanship in human affairs, searched for inte-gration and continuity of ends and means in human experience. Each under-stood that what is crafted is done with care for its own sake and that the crafted artifact—whether object, conversation, or institution—displays this care. These common attitudes marked their respective utopian dispositions.



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At the beginning of Art as Experience Dewey might be taken to speak for them both in respect to the utopian disposition: “What Coleridge said of the reader of poetry is true in its own way of all who are happily absorbed in their activities of mind and body: ‘The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, not by a rest-less desire to arrive at the final solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the journey itself.’”7

Brief comparisons have been made between Morris and Dewey. Alan Ryan imagines that Dewey could quite easily have been a disciple of Ruskin and Morris, and he notes that “Art as Experience . . . showed just how far Dewey could go toward an aesthetic socialism and toward a view of art that linked art and everyday work.”8 In The Craftsman Richard Sennett remarks that “Dewey was a socialist in just the way John Ruskin and William Morris were: all three urged workers to assess the quality of their work in terms of shared experiment, collective trial and error. Good craftsmanship implies socialism.”9 Sennett also proposes “that nearly anyone can become a good craftsman.”10 Morris and Dewey showed how this might be so: Morris by imagining a utopia in which citizens live artfully within an artfully built envi-ronment, Dewey by conceiving of intelligent action that looks to the progres-sive enlargement and democratic enrichment of experience. What can we learn from Morris and Dewey about the craft of utopian experience? I will tackle this question by viewing the craft of experience in Morris’s News from Nowhere through the lens of Dewey’s pragmatic utopianism.

Common to Morris and Dewey is a view that living is making and making is designing. Morris’s work speaks directly to utopia as experience. By utopia Morris meant a form of association in which the development of each is the condition for the development of all. Dewey also held a develop-mental conception of experience, which embodied a vision of a more com-plete form of life radically different from existing capitalist versions of living. Each conveyed a utopian viewpoint at grips with the world and expressed as practical engagement:

Morris: “Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all round you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your



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struggle . . . striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness. . . . And if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”11

Dewey: “The problem of conferring esthetic quality upon all modes of production is a serious problem. But it is a human problem for human solution. . . . In a better-ordered society than that in which we live, an infinitely greater happiness than is now the case would attend all modes of production. We live in a world in which there is an immense amount of organization, but it is an external organi-zation, not one of the ordering of a growing experience, one that involves, moreover, the whole of the live creature, toward a fulfilling conclusion. Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvellous aids in the creation of such a life.”12

From across the span of Dewey’s work I have chosen three perspectives that together map out the craft of experience: “coordinated action,” “habit,” and “artful experience.” Each perspective intimates a utopian conception of experience as outward-looking openness. The third section of this essay uses these ideas to examine aspects of the craft of experience in Morris’s picture of utopia.

Dewey’s Craft of Experience

I have borrowed the phrase “the craft of experience” from Sennett, who, working from within the pragmatic tradition, suggests that using this idea would put the emphasis on “form and procedure—that is, on techniques of experience.”13 A similar emphasis is adopted in this essay. This means that experience is understood from the perspective of actions taken in the pro-cess of making sense of the world and of making it our world. The essential key to understanding Dewey’s pragmatic utopianism is that actions imbue the world with meaning. The forms, procedures, objects, and materials of the world, including the artifacts and arrangements that we introduce into it, are part of that experience. Sennett notes in passing that this viewpoint



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“contests the sort of subjectivity that dwells in the sheer process of feeling. Of course this is a matter of weights; impressions are the raw materials of experience, but only that—raw materials.”14 In fact, impressions are not as “raw” as Sennett supposes, for, as Dewey taught, they are from the beginning the consequences of prior actions.

Ryan concludes that Dewey was a visionary but “a curious visionary, because he did not speak of a distant goal or a city not built with hands. He was a visionary about the here and now, about the potentiality of the modern world.”15 Running right through Dewey’s analysis of modern life is a radical vision of ends-in-view and sometimes of more distant goals, though always it is a construction that can only be built with hands, patiently and carefully. Here we are concerned only with three central ideas that Dewey developed in order to get a hold on the craft of experience, not with his theory as a whole.

I begin with a brief characterization of the three ideas. Coordinated action (seeing, hearing, smelling, reaching, touching, etc.) understands experience holistically, as continuous, potentially integrated, and projective. Actions—attentive to material things, their patterns, their variations and meanings—turn us toward the world and ask, “What is going on here?” Habits are series of actions that constitute ways of living and doing (customs and traditions). Habits ask, “What are the ways of world making around here?” Artful experience is action fulfilled, ordered, and emotionally satisfying. In the case of having an experience, experience is rounded out, consummated. Artful experience asks, “How is experience fulfilled?”

As suggested already each perspective carries with it an anticipation of utopia, and each also implies a critique of experience that is fractured, mechanical, or stuck in a rut. These ideas—tools for understanding the world—are functional perspectives on the flow of experience and are only differentiated for the purposes of analysis. From one perspective experience is action constituting the world, from a second it is habits guiding action, and from a third it is action consummated.

In 1896, the year Morris died, Dewey published a remarkable essay, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.” At the time the reflex arc concept was widely regarded as the most likely candidate for a unifying principle in the new discipline of scientific psychology. Dewey was critical of this concept because its mechanical linking of sensation (stimulus) and action (response) lacked the capacity to offer a coherent and integrated account of experience.



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More precisely, the elements of the reflex arc—stimulus and response—were treated as separate existences and as such were incapable of grasping the flow and organic integration of even the simplest of behaviors. Dewey drew on the standard example of the day. Imagine a child attracted by a candle flame but who is uncertain what this new bit of the world is all about. The child looks and reaches out toward the light (response), is burned by the flame (stimulus), then withdraws (response), and so on. Dewey saw that the child begins not with an external and independent stimulus but with an act of look-ing, with a coordinated action directed at “seeing-for-reaching purposes.”16 At the next stage the child getting burned is also a coordinated action and not an independent phenomenon called a sensation separated from the rest of experience. Each stage is continuous with and completed into what-has-come-before. Looking, reaching, grasping, and withdrawing are not discrete entities but functional parts of a whole. This example shows a child actively identifying bits of the world—facts—and questioning them. For Dewey, “the real problem may be equally well stated as either to constitute [discover] the stimulus . . . or to constitute [discover] the response. . . . The question of whether to reach or to abstain from reaching is the question what sort of a bright light have we here? Is it one which means playing with one’s hands, eating milk, or burning one’s fingers? The stimulus must be constituted for the response to occur.”17 Our actions, then, are “a comprehensive or organic unity . . . [not a] patchwork of disjointed parts.”18

Dewey concluded that unity intimates coordination and continuity in experience. This conception carries with it an immanent critique of any experience that is disjointed, inchoate, or dualistic. Brilliantly, Dewey applied the implications of this analysis to a critique of many aspects of capitalist culture in which means and ends are predominantly articulated in narrowly instrumental and external ways. Dewey’s holistic account of action points to a view of experience and hence to a kind of world in which means and ends consist of an integrated continuity. This is the sensorimotor anticipation of utopian possibilities. By locating the utopian register in the forms of action Dewey was on the way to being a utopian in a pragmatic key. For example, much later in Democracy and Education, one of his greatest and most utopian works, Dewey speaks of “the specific continuity of the surroundings with [the individual’s] own active tendencies.”19

“Habits are arts.”20 This highly condensed statement summarizing Dewey’s view may sound odd, accustomed as we are to thinking of habits



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as adaptations based on fixed routines. Habits suggest repetitions requiring little conscious thinking. Creativity and openness to new ways of acting and thinking are, therefore, not dispositions that seem to fit comfortably with the conventional understanding of habit. As William James famously put it, “Habit is . . . the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.”21 While Dewey acknowledged the positive and negative roles of rou-tine and repetition in behavior, he characteristically broadened the concept of habit. In his hands it serves both to grasp the creativity of social experience and to criticize entrenched traditions, hence its dual relevance to utopian thinking.

Dewey begins by emphasizing the active role of habit in using and assimilating the environment. Habits involve sensorimotor skills, craft, and cunning as well as objective materials in the environment. In an example that would have delighted Morris, Dewey considers a skilled stonemason. The art of the stonemason cannot be understood as if it were individually cooped up in the craftsman or craftswoman. Habits are links with and to the environment. The history and geography of the locale in which the work goes on along with the stones and the tools are all part of the stonemason’s habits.22 Habits are constituted by series of interlinked actions, and insofar as they are part of the continuing patterns of behavior in society, they are also part of that society’s past, present, and future, “links in forming the endless chain of humanity.”23 Like coordinated action, habits, too, turn us outward to the environment, in their use of skills, materials, and customs: “Habits assimilate objective material, and eventuate in command of the environ-ment. They require order, discipline, and manifest technique.”24

For Dewey, habit means “that kind of human activity which is influenced by prior activity and in that sense acquired; which contains within itself a certain ordering or systematisation of minor elements of action; which is projective, dynamic in quality, ready for overt manifestation . . . the essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response . . . spe-cial sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predi-lections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts.”25 From a Deweyan point of view, utopia is the integrated development of those habits and traditions that support a better, more intelligent and liberated future. The mutual interpenetration of habits maps character. One can properly speak, then, of the habits and character of utopia. Without this interpen-etration of habits “conduct would lack unity being only a juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separate situations.”26



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From a utopian perspective the most original aspect of Dewey’s under-standing of habits is in their forwardly directed orientation. Having noted that habits are crucial to historical experience, he also noted that history could not be understood simply as reproduction; it is necessary to continu-ally remake and refashion the social environment. Whatever use we make of the habits of the past, it cannot be for the sake of the past “but for the sake of a present so secure and enriched that it will create a yet better future. . . . [H]abits incorporate objective conditions in themselves.”27

Dewey’s view of education shows how habit may play itself out in relation to utopia. On the side of critique Dewey observes that behavioral plasticity and helplessness too frequently provide the occasion for taking advantage of children. They are conservatively trained in terms of fixed customs supportive of society’s ruling order. Children are instructed so that “the forming of habits becomes a guarantee for the maintenance of hedges of custom.”28 On the side of utopian imagination Dewey hoped that “a future new society of changed purposes and desires may be created by a deliberate humane treatment of the impulses of youth.”29 With regard to realizing this hope within capitalist society Dewey was overly optimistic to say the least. Be that as it may, Dewey’s understanding of habit, as central to creative intel-ligence, does promise a useful perspective from which to observe education in utopia, where “original modifiability has . . . been given a fair chance to act as a trustee for a better human life.”30 In thinking about the development of habits Dewey was always struck by how children bring fresh ways of looking, feeling, and touching to the world: “Every gained power is the delightful discovery of one’s own power and the wonders of the world. . . . [W]e envy children their love of new experiences, their intentness in extract-ing the last drop of significance from each situation, their vital seriousness in things that to us are outworn.”31 And as a utopian the intimation never escaped him “that there are in the unformed activities of childhood and youth the possibilities of a better life for the community. . . . For all its extrav-agances and uncertainties, its effusions and reticences, it remains a standing proof of a life wherein growth is normal not an anomaly, activity a delight not a task, and where habit-forming is an expansion of power not its shrink-age.”32 In utopia the craft of experience should ensure that habits, whether of “the cook, musician, carpenter, citizen or statesman,” will be intelligent, flexible, and artful, not unintelligent and merely routine.33



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In Art as Experience Dewey set out to locate the foundations of the artful and the aesthetic in ordinary life. He began by observing that art is very often, even mainly, removed from life; it is glorified, put into museums, and placed on far-off pedestals. Not surprisingly, in these circumstances art loses its connection with everyday life. Dewey’s starting point is entirely sympathetic with Morris’s view that art cannot be restricted to the so-called high arts. To grasp the aesthetic in its “finest” and “highest” forms Dewey asks that we begin with ordinary artifacts and “people in our own homes and on our own streets.”34 To take his best-known example, he first notes a fire engine scream-ing through the city and then, one imagines, plays tribute to construction workers on the Empire State Building, before turning to snapshots of action at the scale of single individuals. Dewey advises us to begin “in the raw”:

in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights and sounds that hold the crowd—the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in the air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burn-ing on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals . . . [and] the intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged.35

Here people are not just spectators but actively focused, their attention held by things in the world, looking closely and relating activities to aspira-tions and purposes. Dewey reminds us that in previous times and in other places there have been and are peoples “for whom everything that intensi-fies the sense of immediate living is an object of intense admiration.”36 And to reinforce the everydayness of the aesthetic Dewey offers a casual list of artifacts and artistic genres including waving feathers, gaudy robes, shining



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ornaments, domestic utensils, furnishings, rugs, mats, bows, spears and pots, dancing, pantomime, music, painting, sculpture, and building. Echoing Morris, Dewey notes that these were the products of great care that enhanced and enlivened everyday life and that they were seen as an integral part of organized life in the community, village, city, and country. Dewey wants us to take note of the details of daily life, as Morris had before him.

In “Art Under Plutocracy,” a lively lecture delivered half a century before Dewey spoke on these matters, Morris argued for extending “the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of all the externals of our life.”37 Dewey wished to show “the continuity of aesthetic experience with normal pro-cesses of living” and the “continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.”38 He, too, extends art and the experience of art to “all the externals of our life.” Dewey’s emphasis on the continuity between ordinary life and the aesthetic captures the central meaning of Morris’s utopia described in News from Nowhere. These views gesture yet again in the direction of Dewey’s utopian desire to view and understand experience holistically.

Dewey grasped what is most basic in the aesthetic by considering the development of experience in what he called the live creature. The relation-ship between a creature and the environment is characterized by successive phases of obstacles confronted and problems solved. In the process of solving problems and restoring equilibrium the organism may experience growth resulting in a more encompassing and richer relationship with the environ-ment. This is the central meaning of development and experience charac-terized by “internal integration and fulfilment reached though ordered and organized movement. This artistic structure may be immediately felt.”39 In this sense it has an aesthetic quality. Dewey thought that this quality char-acterized what he called having an experience. An experience is marked by consummation, expressed as the sense of satisfactory completion, of resolu-tion, of wholeness and unity, of “self-sufficiency.”40 Dewey’s examples are as follows: “a piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of



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eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation.”41

Not every moment is a moment of having an experience. Much expe-rience is slack, drifting, just going on, routine, with no definite beginnings or endings. Alternatively, experience can be arrested, choked, inhibited, or abbreviated: “Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of experience.”42 Dewey looked to the potential artfulness of experience—including those artifacts conventionally called works of art—to address these tendencies of fragmentation and lack of integrity: “Through art, meanings of objects that are otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted are clarified and concentrated . . . by the creation of a new experience . . . [, which] keeps alive the common world in its fullness.”43 By viewing the world from this perspective Dewey identi-fied the most significant outcome of the craft of experience, “experience in its integrity.”44 A Deweyan definition of utopia might be, then, the common world in its fullness.

At the end of the introduction above I quoted Dewey to the effect that the artfulness of experience is a problem to be solved in any form of social organization, such as capitalism, which is destructive of the integration of means and ends. Like Dewey, Morris, too, was just as scathing of art treated as the instrumental showiness of class power. The solution, Dewey thought, would only result from “the appropriate ordering of a growing experience.”45 Dewey’s analysis of action, habit, and artful experience points to a society in which children, adults, and citizens can be creative and every person a craft-sperson. For Dewey, creativity means being genuinely productive and con-tributing in terms of one’s gifts and powers. He did not think that creativity was either a mysterious inner force or peculiar to people regarded as rare geniuses: “Each individual that comes into the world is a new beginning; the universe itself is, as it were, taking a new start in him and trying to do something, even if on a small scale, that it has never done before.”46

Dewey tied the craft of experience to those actions, artifacts, and natu-ral objects that carry a signal of life as it might be lived more intelligently. But this could only be fully possible, he thought, in democratic communi-ties that support reciprocity between people. Art anticipates this pragmatic vision of utopia because “it quickens us from the slackness of routine and



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enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experi-encing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms. It intercepts every shade of expressiveness found in objects and orders them in a new experi-ence of life. . . . In art the forces that are congenial, that sustain not this or that special aim but the process of enjoyed experience itself, are set free.”47

At the age of ninety, and for the last time, Dewey linked the threads of coordinated action, habit, and artful experience in a single sweep: “There is no inherent difference between fullness of activity and artistic activity; the latter is one with being fully alive. Hence it is not something possessed by a few persons and setting them apart from the rest of mankind, but is the normal or natural human heritage. . . . [I]t provides the pattern and model of the full and free growth of personality and full life activity, wherever it occurs.”48 This is a sketch of utopia that supports the idea that anyone can be a craftsperson.

Morris’s Artful Utopia

News from Nowhere pictures a utopian society where actions—as means and as ends-in-view—are continuously integrated within a way of life where citizens are actively “part of it all.”49 Nowhere is a utopia in which people have been liberated from living lives that are alienated. Goode has noted that “the novel brings out the inextricability of the unalienated mind with the conditions which can allow it to grow.”50 Although Goode thinks that News from Nowhere places the emphasis on attitudes rather than conditions, this is, at the least, a contestable conclusion. From a pragmatic perspective there is an internal linkage between the two; conditions are part of attitudes, their instantiation in fact. In any event, it is not surprising to find a master craftsman like Morris putting the accent on the material conditions of experience, on artifacts, people, and physical environments. For Morris, as we have already noted of Dewey, the craft of experience puts primary emphasis on actions, objects, and events that connect us with the world, rather than on sentiments and inner feelings.

We first meet William Guest (the narrator) as he is about to enter utopia. Following a fractious political meeting at his local socialist society he wishes that he could but see a day of the “future of the fully-developed society.”51 After a crowded trip on the Underground, “forced on us like a habit,” Guest



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catches an intimation of utopian hope as he walks home.52 We find him enthralled in an experience:

It was a beautiful night of early winter, the air just sharp enough to be refreshing after the hot room and the stinking railway car-riage. The wind, which had lately turned a point or two north of west, had blown the sky clear of all cloud save a light fleck or two which went swiftly down the heavens. There was a young moon half way up the sky, and as the home-farer caught sight of it, tangled in the branches of an old elm, he could scarce bring to his mind the shabby London suburb where he was, and he felt as if he were in a pleasant country place—pleasanter, indeed, than the deep country was as he had known it. . . . [O]f the discussion itself there remained no trace, save a vague hope, that was now become a pleasure, for days of peace and rest, and cleanness and smiling goodwill.53

Guest’s actions focus on what is to-be-enjoyed-and-explored. In Morris’s understanding, like Dewey’s, the utopian impulse comes down to actions directed at a world riven through with meaning. In his transition to utopia Guest already catches the hint of a world radically different in its organi-zation, culture, and experience from the profit-driven instrumentalism of capitalism.

Guest observes with a well-practiced eye and with the kind of absorbed attention that a child or craftsman shows. Although Morris’s example is more sophisticated than the child with a candle flame, the simpler case exemplifies the essence of what Guest is doing: engaging with the immediate material world—holding, smelling, seeing, hearing, trying to figure out what is going on, being surprised that old habits are now out of kilter, asking questions, and wondering. Like a very interested tourist Guest is not merely passing through or even just adapting to utopia but, rather, mindfully turning it all over with his hands, eyes, and ears, discovering and rediscovering the con-tinuities and integrations within utopian experience. Sounding like Dewey in Art as Experience, Morris in “The Aims of Art” counsels, “The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”54 To Guest this genuine interest is typical of the utopians: “They were eager to discuss all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the last new house, the plenty or lack of such and such birds, and so on; they talked of



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these things not in a fatuous and conventional way, but as taking, I say, real interest in them.”55

A striking feature of Guest’s picture of utopia is its detailed attentiveness to all kinds of artifacts, architecture, streetscapes, landscapes, and patterns of social interaction. During his stay Guest moves through a succession of connected spaces and environments. In each space and in the transitions between them he has the opportunity to participate in the prosaic activi-ties of utopia. The trip itself is drawn by the ordered continuities running between country and town, buildings and fields, houses and markets, urban squares and courtyards, woodlands, riverbanks, and gardens. These spaces frame an almost seamless expression of leisure, pleasurable work, and rest. For instance, he notes, hears about, or directly experiences and admires the following: the presentation of food, drinking glasses, bowls, furniture, cloth-ing, windows, how rooms open from one to another, wall hangings, revo-lutionary history and utopian politics, children playing, relations between the sexes, disappointments in life, living arrangements, how work is done and tools are used, street design, a boat trip, riverbank and forest plantings, flowers, birds, insects, and farms. He also observes the customs of reciproc-ity between citizens as they go about their daily lives; these people are vari-ously described as friendly, gay, good looking, joyous, healthy, pretty, strong, and handsome. The same or similar words are also used to describe his observations of artifacts and environments.

The continuities of utopia contrast for Guest with the discontinuities characteristic of his pre-utopian experience: “As we went over [a] pretty bridge we saw the waters . . . covered with gay boats of different sizes. There were houses about, some on the road, some amongst the fields with pleasant lanes leading down to them, and each surrounded by a teeming garden. They were all pretty in design, and as solid as might be. . . . Almost everybody was gaily dressed, but especially the women . . . and the greater part [of the people] were frankly and openly joyous.”56 Guest is struck by how a boatman speaks, acts, and dresses “like some specially manly and refined young gentleman, playing waterman for a spree.”57 Equally interesting is the river view. In place of an old bridge is a “wonder of a bridge,” and the waterman points out that “the up-stream bridges, which are so much smaller, are scarcely daintier, and the down-stream ones are scarcely more dignified and stately.”58 In place of the heavy industry and ugly buildings Guest remembers, the riverbank is now dotted with well-designed houses and flower gardens that send



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“delicious waves of summer scent over the eddying stream,” and he concludes that the houses look, “so to say, alive and sympathetic with the life of the dwellers in them.”59

His arrival at a guesthouse extends further his emerging sense of the integration of means and ends in daily life. Guest responds to the form and ornamentation of the house, noting that it is “very handsomely built . . . designed with a force and directness,” and that it opens out onto gardens.60 A “gaily painted” internal fresco echoing the subjects of a frieze on the exteri-or reinforces the unity of elements within experience.61 Bit by bit the patterns and rhythms in the utopian environment begin to effect a reconstruction of Guest’s experience: “Though [the house] was not very large one felt in it that exhilarating sense of space and freedom which satisfactory architec-ture always gives to an unanxious man who is in the habit of using his eyes.”62

In a comment on Dewey, but equally applicable to Morris, Ryan illus-trates the point about the artful coordination of action, as the reciprocity between means and ends, in the following way: “It is easy to suggest that we live the way we do because we are engaged in instrumental activities: We drive on clogged highways not for its own sake but to get to work. . . . Dewey denied that the ugliness of life and work was the result of a conflict between instrumental goods and ideal ends, as if handsome train stations and clean streets that give us pleasure as we walk them were a vain hope; it was rather a failure to think hard enough about enough of the consequences.”63 The utopian environment similarly denies any gulf between means and ends. Old Hammond, a historian who gives instruction to Guest, makes the same point as Ryan, though more colorfully. Talking about class structures—where means and ends are divided between servant and master, worker and boss—he observes “that silly nineteenth-century fashion, current amongst rich so-called cultivated people, of ignoring all the steps by which their daily din-ner was reached, as matters too low for their lofty intelligence,” much as we in the “advanced” capitalist countries continue to ignore the exploited sources and peoples that supply our food, oil, clothes, comforts, and leisure.64

What Guest is undergoing is not, principally, an education of desire but a practical education organized around the intensely practical question, What is going on here, and what do I do now? Guest is beginning to understand a utopian environment informed by an overall sense of design in which the means of living and the ends of comfort and pleasure are artfully brought together. Pleasure and joy, to use two of Morris’s favorite words, name the



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emotion of Guest’s experience, while reciprocity and continuity describe its form. His senses catch the utopian content of artful living.

When it comes to habits and customs Guest is repeatedly tripped up by what he sees and hears. He attempts to pay for his early morning boat ride with money, but the sculler is flummoxed, only slowly realizing that Guest sees him as providing a service, for which he should receive something, “which I am not to give to a neighbour, unless he has done something special for me.”65 In any event, it turns out that the waterman does ferrying because it is his business and he’s good at it, “which I would do for anybody; so to take gifts in connection with it would look very queer.”66 The absence of matri-monial and property law is equally puzzling until Guest grasps the implica-tions of there being no private property and hence no business for a divorce court to undertake. He begins to understand that customs must be governed noncoercively by reciprocity (freedom) between equals. As Hammond tells Guest, “There is no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged: no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are forced to pronounce, either by unconsidered habit, or by the unexpressed threat of the lesser interdict, if they are lax in their hypocrisy.”67

Housing arrangements provide one expression of the libertarian habits framing everyday life in utopia. People live according to preference, “yet no door is shut to any good-tempered person who is content to live as the other house-mates do: only of course it would be unreasonable for one man to drop into a household and bid the folk of it to alter their habits to please him, since he can go elsewhere and live as he pleases.”68 In all areas of social organi-zation Guest finds a structure of freedom that shakes loose his conventional understanding about habits in relation to social stability. He arrives in utopia with the assumption that the social routines and customs, along with individ-ual habits, are governed mainly by considerations external to the activity in question: for example, property law mediating family relations, the economy effecting a narrow vocational correspondence between education and work, the market calculating the value of art, the factory owner determining what will be produced and how, managers managing others, and religion indis-criminately offering abstract comfort from above.

Dewey called such habits dead or unintelligent; Morris called them arti-ficial coercion, forced, or unconsidered. Neither thought that habits must inevitably be external in this way or necessarily conservative. We have already



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noted Dewey’s view that habit can be renewed and extended by a creative use of the past for the sake of the future. Morris took a similar view, believing that utopia is the means of renewal and reconstruction. The past provides resources that can be used to enrich society. “If something works to enrich life and make it more liberated, then use it” is a working rule common to both Morris and Dewey. With democratic participation in place of leaders, managers, and external authorities, habits are free to develop as real sources of imagination. In utopia each person is capable of enriching the common life. Hammond tells Guest,

More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit of the Middle Ages to whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a real-ity, that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth; which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which bade them contemn it. . . . [A]nd now we do, both in word and deed, believe in the continuous life of the world of men, and as it were, add every day of that common life to the little stock of days which our own mere individual experience wins for us.69

As Guest looks about and is guided by answers to his questions he begins, like Dewey, to see that utopia has also effected a change of mean-ing in the concept of habit itself, toward something more creative and progressive than its conventional meaning suggests. Guest is told and he also observes that the divisions of capitalist society have been eliminated from institutions and customs: “We have simplified our lives a great deal from what they were, and got rid of many conventionalities and many sham wants, which used to give our forefathers much trouble . . . and a tradition or habit of life has been growing on us; and that habit has become a habit of acting on the whole for the best. . . . That is in short the foundation of our life and happiness.”70

This view might be compared with Dewey’s notion of habit as a special sensitiveness, as open and projective imagination based on extensive equality across society. Understanding habits like Dewey did, as tools waiting in a box to be used, would have made complete sense to Morris, who, as we have just noted, also saw them as sources of creativity. The habits and customs of uto-pia characterize a form of life that is, by and for the people, a life informed



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by a “complete equality which we now recognize as the bond of all happy human society.”71 Guest begins to grasp the meaning of experience in a com-munity where happiness follows from the freedom of each person “to do what he [or she] can do best, joined to the knowledge of what . . . we really want.”72 In the face of the utopian way of life Guest reflects on the craft of his own experience, “I was, so to say, stripped bare of every habitual thought and way of acting.”73

The continuities and integrations within and across experiences lie at the center of the utopian habit of acting in terms of seeing the world whole. To remind ourselves of a key pragmatic point, habits are forms of expe-riential continuity. The pleasures of living that Guest repeatedly observes demonstrate this. For example, with a designer’s eye Guest notes that the women “were decently veiled with drapery, and not bundled up with mil-linery; they were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs. . . . [T]heir dress was somewhat between that of the ancient classical costume and the simpler forms of the fourteenth-century garments.”74 He goes on to link the beauty of the women and their ways of dressing with the equivalent beauty of the gardens, the architecture, and the men, as elsewhere he links farming and gardening: “The fields were everywhere treated as a garden made for the pleasure as well as the livelihood of all.”75 Despite acute obser-vations about utopian fashion and design, Guest later finds himself at the sharp end of a question from Clara, a young woman: “Do you think there is anything wrong in liking to see the coverings of our bodies beautiful like our bodies are?—just as a deer’s or an otter’s skin has been made beauti-ful from the first? Come, what is wrong with you[?] . . . I bowed before the storm, and mumbled out some excuse or other. I must say, I might have known that people who were so fond of architecture generally, would not be backward in ornamenting themselves.”76 The waterman was dressed in simple but finely woven clothes, and the clasp on his belt was of “dama-scened steel beautifully wrought.”77 A refuse collector was so finely dressed that Guest named him the Golden Dustman, and to his surprise Guest came across a gang of road workers who were dressed just as finely. The forms of address between people also reinforced the fact of experiential continuity for him. The standard use of neighbor and friend in greetings and discussions con-veys a reciprocity in social relations that includes, for example, exchanging work with each other for periods of time and which extends to the labor process itself: “Men make for their neighbours’ use as if they were making



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for themselves, not for a vague market of which they know nothing, and over which they have no control.”78

Utopian customs and traditions show Guest how things are done in a society that is restful and allows itself to think hard enough about enough of the consequences. Guest is discovering that the craft of experience—as the holistic coordination of actions—goes all the way across and down in utopia. The trip itself through the city and up the river records the impress of experi-ence on the formation of Guest’s new utopian habits. If Dewey were watch-ing, he would notice that as Guest “passes from one situation to another . . . he does not find himself living in another world but in a different part or aspect of the same world.”79

Education and socialization are keys to habit formation in any society. In class societies raising the young is the domain where Dewey’s conserva-tive and repressive “hedges of custom” are to be found. Drawing unfavorable comparisons with utopia Hammond reminds Guest about the class educa-tion of elites at Oxford and Cambridge, “breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites who called themselves cultivated people.”80 He is also given a reminder about the deadening requirements of pre-utopian learning and teaching, such as requiring children to start school at a given age, “whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be,” and subjecting them to a “certain conventional course of ‘learning’” without regard to the facts of development.81 In a distinctly Deweyan tone Dick, his travel guide, chides Guest, “My friend, can’t you see that such a proceeding means ignoring the fact of growth, bodily and mental. . . . [W]e are no longer hurried and the information lies ready to each one’s hand when his own inclinations impel him to seek it. . . . [W]e can afford to give ourselves time to grow.”82 Utopian children may still turn out to disappoint the hopes of their parents, friends, and communities, but this will be “part of the mingled pleasure and pain which goes to make up the life of mankind” and not a failure that results from the “artificial disabilities” of a class society.83

Providing further insight into the education of habits Old Hammond tells Guest that only those children who are especially strong would stand some chance of surviving the class injuries of schooling in a capitalist society. Interestingly, he then observes that the development of new habits necessary to utopia has benefited from the “spirit of rebellion” that is characteristic of most children. Here, inside utopia, we are again reminded of Dewey’s view that the natural exuberance of children intimates a life marked by growth,



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delightful activity, and the potential for forming habits that are expansive and projective. Guest sees that utopia gives plasticity in the young a privileged position in order to ensure, in Dewey’s words, the “ability to form habits of independent judgement and of inventive initiation.”84

Traveling through a wooded area Guest observes children, aged from about seven years to late adolescence, who are camping out over the sum-mer. Their parents encourage this as a way of getting children out of the house where they will only “stew” and because “they can learn to do things for themselves, and get to notice the wild creatures . . . [and] it gives them a little rough work.”85 Guest is attracted by the enjoyment of the children as they cook over campfires. At the same time he is somewhat startled to discover that this is not just summer camping before the children return to school, for in utopia there are no schools.86 He wants to know about “their mental education, the teaching of their minds.”87 Dick is puzzled by this question and explains that the children are learning skills as they make and do. He suggests that Guest has, perhaps, not learned to do things like thatching, looking after a horse, carpentry, cooking, house-building, gar-dening, or street-paving and “if that is the case, don’t run away with the idea that it doesn’t take some skill to do them, and doesn’t give plenty of work for one’s mind.”88

Human development in utopia, like everything else, is restful, not hur-ried. This is not a contingent fact about utopia but reflective of its deep-est organizing principles. Children need time to develop their sensorimotor skills and to develop habits of work through imitating adults whom they see “engaged in genuinely amusing work.”89 And anyway, it is pointed out to Guest that in utopia everyone finds their level by around the age of twenty. The underlying view of habit formation in utopia is that “tis no use forcing people’s tastes” because children will come to “live and act according to the measure of their own faculties.”90 Utopia is that set of conditions that gives modifiability a reasonable chance, as Dewey was later to hope and argue for.

As we have seen, Dewey argued in Art as Experience that artistry or artfulness could be a feature of all human experience. This view cap-tures much about the utopian way of doing, making, and using things as Morris portrays it. Being artful is the utopian habit and virtue par excel-lence since it realizes the full meaning of experience, by showing it in its integrity as ordered and integrated. The idea of art as artifacts set aside in museums and removed from daily life is very nearly incomprehensible



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in utopia. Although the notion of works of art remitted to museums would be puzzling to the citizens of utopia, Dewey’s proposition that “the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience” would still be perfectly comprehensible.91 On the way through a city square, Dick explains to Guest that a “not over beautiful” building is the National Gallery, where old pictures are kept as curiosities.92 Dick is not sure why it is called a National Gallery but admits that it contains some very fine works and that buildings with the same name are found up and down the country. In a later conversation Old Hammond widens the range of arti-facts that count as non-art to include the mass production of “slave wares” for the poor and “wealth-wasting wares” for the conspicuous ornamenta-tion and consumption of the wealthy.93 What Guest at first feels is a conun-drum about art evaporates. In utopia, “the production of what used to be called art, but which has no name amongst us now . . . has become a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces,” and if art has any name at all it is now called “work-pleasure.”94 Hammond explains that this reflects the development of a habit among people “to do the best they could with the work in hand . . . and when that had gone on for a little, a craving for beauty seemed to awaken in men’s minds. . . . [B]y slow degrees we got pleasure into our work; then we became conscious of that pleasure, and cultivated it, and took care that we had our fill of it.”95 Echoing Ruskin, Morris defined art in “Art Under Plutocracy” as “MAN’S EXPRESSION OF HIS JOY IN LABOUR.”96 Recalling Dewey’s examples of the graceful ball player, the absorbed gardener, and the intelligent mechanic it can be seen that this definition is quite as much Deweyan. Through the active exercise of their faculties all are artistically engaged in the everyday business of life.

The same point about the “noncategory” of art—the “external beauty” of commodities for profit and as markers of ruling-class tastes—can be made, perhaps, from another angle.97 Near the end of his trip Guest visits a beautiful old house. With just a hint of irony he looks at a tapestry, “originally of no artistic value, but now faded into pleasant grey tones which harmonized thor-oughly well with the quiet of the place.”98 In its faded state the tapestry is seen as part of the experience of the room’s restful ambience. It is no longer just a bright decorative object announcing itself a little too insistently. The tapes-try’s former status as an artifact of an independently wealthy man has been, as it were, redeemed through fading, thereby becoming part of an extended and shared experience. The art object becomes part of the experience of



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anyone who finds “some sense of pleasure in the making,” the using, and the contemplating.99

Artistry in utopia, as the integration of means and ends, coordinates the actions and habits of “ordinary daily life.”100 Guest comes to see that utopia is indeed both art as experience and experience as art. Hammond points out to Guest that in this new world people live with beauty, are active and produc-tive in making things, and, for the most part, enjoy their work: “What more can we ask of life?”101 Ellen, a young woman who accompanies Guest on the river trip, simply tells him that “you are not used to our life of repose amidst of energy; of work which is pleasure and pleasure which is work.”102

The pleasure of producing things, “since nobody need make such things unless they like,” and the pleasure of using things mean that everyone can participate in an artful environment: “[Our dinner showed] that those who had prepared it were interested in it. . . . [E]verything was simple, though so excellent of its kind. . . . The glass, crockery, and plate were very beautiful to my eyes used to the study of medieval art . . . the crockery being lead-glazed pot-ware though beautifully ornamented . . . so that, even apart from the delightful excitement of the day, I had never eaten my dinner so pleasantly before.”103 This experience of dinner is just one example of artful labor that Guest comes across in utopia. But he also wonders about hard necessary work like road mending. Here, too, he discovers that work is pleasurable, undertaken by people “laughing and talking merrily” who are “very deft in their labour” and who enjoy using and refining definite skills.104 What sustains this artful experience is labor performed in a society of complete democracy in which the informing principles are equality and community.105 Guest, who has still not quite got the point, puzzles about how people will work if there is no monetary reward: “‘No reward of labour?’ said Hammond, gravely. ‘The reward of labour is life. Is this not enough?’”106 Hammond thinks that work in utopia can be pleasurable for one of three reasons: first, because there will be a gain in honor (recognition of the outcomes) and wealth (learning on the job and extending knowledge); second, because, although not immediately pleasant, it grows into a pleasurable habit (mechanical work); and third, because the work is sensuous (the work of an artist). Each type of work is intensively layered with utopian meaning and points in the direction of experience rounded out rather than fragmented. In utopia the probability of artfulness is increased by the absence of coercion and by the freedom to pursue work to which one is best suited. Each person



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attempts to make his or her “own work pleasanter and pleasanter, which of course tends towards raising the standard of excellence.”107 The development of habits of craftsmanship based on internal motivation is the most funda-mental change in the extension of utopian experience because it sustains artful work and artful life continuously across the whole society, “the change which makes all others possible.”108 And with this consideration in mind, Hammond concludes that art and science are inexhaustible as sources of the artful life: “As more and more of pleasure is imported into work, I think we shall take up kinds of work which produce desirable wares, but which we gave up because we could not carry them on pleasantly.”109

Dewey turning to ordinary activities and artifacts as the way to under-stand the place of aesthetics in experience may, at first, seem surprising. And it remains so for those who think that there must be some loftier or more intellectual foundation for art. To craftsmen, craftswomen, and artists, espe-cially to Morris, Dewey’s position would seem more or less obvious.110 At first Guest feigns some surprise about this as the starting point of artfulness: “But people putting in practice commonly this sense of interest in the ordinary occupations of life rather startles me.”111 Near the end of the visit another old citizen, Morsom, draws this aspect of Guest’s utopian education toward a conclusion: “We have learned the trick of handicraft, and have added the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagina-tion. . . . [Guest reflects on this:] ‘I looked, and wondered indeed at the deft-ness and abundance of beauty of the work of men who had at last learned to accept life itself as pleasure, and the satisfaction of the common needs of mankind and the preparation for them as work fit for the best of the race.’”112 In utopia Guest is beginning to see as the utopians see. The trick of craftsman-ship is, of course, the relation of pleasure and work. C. Wright Mills, refer-encing Morris, emphasized that the trick underpins and informs a whole way of living. Work is done for its own sake, and there are few or no externally imposed ends; it is meaningful because the means (the work) and the ends (the outcomes) are integrated into the flow of experience; and the worker determines the process of making and thus learns from it and develops her or his skills.113 An integrated continuity of action emerges at the center of uto-pia, of play-work-development-community. Utopia is the embodiment of this continuity in the conditions and artifacts of everyday life. More specifically, Morris’s utopia is a craftsman’s tribute to the craft of experience, a tribute in harmony with Dewey’s understanding of action and artful experience.



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In “My Pedagogic Creed” Dewey captures the identity of craftsmanship with education, or the craft of experience, as “a process of living and not a prepara-tion for future living.”114 This is exactly Morris’s understanding.

Having an experience is the opposite of the fragmented, disheveled kind of experience that Guest first registered as the overheated discontent of living in nineteenth-century capitalist England. During his stay in uto-pia he refers back to his old experience as a way of making an unfavorable comparison with this or that aspect of living in utopia. By drawing threads of meaning through the world the craft of experience intimates a potential for experience to be fulfilled. In the course of Guest’s visit these moments of consummated experience show the degree to which utopian conditions support a more rounded and satisfying form of life. The first example is the experience already referred to that intimates “days of peace and rest” prior to Guest’s dream entrance into utopia. This experience shows how an intimate dialogue with objective conditions in the environment crafts expectations. During the first morning of his utopian holiday Guest reports that “the whole mass of architecture we had come upon so suddenly from amidst the pleasant fields was not only exquisitely beautiful in itself, but bore upon it the expression of such generosity and abundance of life that I was exhilarated to a pitch that I had never yet reached. I fairly chuckled for pleasure. . . . [W]e had pulled up amongst a crowd of carts, wherein sat handsome healthy-looking people, men, women, and children very gaily dressed.”115 This is a version of a better-ordered society in which a much greater happiness is a common and shared characteristic of daily living. The fields, architecture, and people are all integral parts of an experience that simultaneously indicates and explicates the formation of habits of utopian sensitivity and predilection (new habits in Guest’s case).

Guest summarizes the experience of his first day in utopia as follows:

For the first time in my life, I was having my fill of the pleasure of the eyes without any of that sense, of incongruity, that dread of approaching ruin. . . . Here I could enjoy everything without an after-thought of the injustice and miserable toil which made my lei-sure; the ignorance and dullness of life which went to make my keen appreciation of history; the tyranny and the struggle full of fear and mishap which went to make my romance. . . . [I] went to bed happy, and in a few moments was in a dreamless sleep.”116



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This summary is Morris’s proof that utopian experience is experience crafted in a society without classes. Guest’s experience is itself the result of integration between many experiences already undergone during the day. If Dewey had had the opportunity to observe Guest throughout the day, as Morris, so to speak, did, he would not have been surprised by this outcome. He might well have analyzed Guest’s experience in this way: “Art [utopia] is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action.”117

On the evening of his second day Guest notes that “my spirits . . . were as high as possible; though the strangeness and excitement of the happy and quiet life which I saw everywhere around me was, it is true, a little wearing off, yet a deep content, as different as possible from languid acquiescence, was taking its place, and I was, as it were, really new-born.”118 Guest’s imaginative disposition—what he is willfully sensitive and accessible to—has begun to get a hold on and in turn be held by the customs of utopia. The utopian crafting of experience has weakened, and to some extent displaced (reconstructed), Guest’s old habits, not merely by calling them into question or by appeal-ing to sentiment but, in Dewey’s terms, by confronting Guest with new and changed “objective arrangements and institutions.”119 This is experience in the process of integration, and it “can be built up only as a world of related objects is constructed.”120 As a “newborn” Guest now finds himself in an envi-ronment that opens his actions and habits to new possibilities, all under the control of his own powers and faculties.

Conclusion

After leaving utopia and waking from the dream Guest thinks back on the visit. While not despairing, as if it had been merely a dream, he has a definite feeling of having really seen “all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle.”121 In this pragmatic reflection Guest considers his experience in the round. The main lines of experience—the pre-utopian and the utopian—are seen in relation to each other. Hope lies in the historical struggle for fellow-ship, rest, and happiness. Mindful of the prejudice, anxiety, and unhappiness of the present, he can see the outlines of a duly ordered society that fosters the growing experience of all its citizens.



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For Morris utopia is a practical vision. In the final sentence of “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” which anticipates the last sentences of News from Nowhere, he links the present to utopia: “Whatever the nature of our strife for peace may be, if we only aim at it steadily and with a singleness of heart, and ever keep it in view, a reflection from that peace of the future will illumine the turmoil and trouble of our lives, whether the trouble be seemingly petty, or obviously tragic; and we shall, in our hopes at least, live the lives of men: nor can the present times give us any reward greater than that.”122 Dewey would find plenty to agree with in this statement.

From the perspective of crafting experience, Old Hammond states the essential conclusion to News from Nowhere late in the afternoon on Guest’s first day. Reflecting on the continuous and coherent character of utopian experi-ence, he speaks of a faith in humanity. “Where,” he asks Guest, “is the diffi-culty in accepting the religion of humanity,” when men and women are free, happy, and energetic and are physically beautiful and surrounded by beautiful things they have made themselves and where nature, no longer despoiled, is made better by human usage attentive to enough of the consequences? “This is what this age of the world has reserved for us.”123 As an old philosopher Dewey also reflected on the meaning of continuity in utopian experience. The task, according to Dewey, is to conserve, transmit, rectify, and expand the heritage of experience we have received, so that the experience of the future will be more solid, secure, accessible, and shared. He thought that this quali-fied as a common faith, as experience that would be free from destructive divisions such as class, gender, race, and sect. “It remains,” Dewey concluded, “to make it explicit.”124 Morris and Dewey understood, then, that utopian experience emerges from our actions in relation to things with which we are familiar, simple things . . . recognizable as the things touched by the hands during the day. . . . All drawn with admirable simplicity and excellent design—all a unity.

Notes

1. Paul Meier, “An Unpublished Lecture of William Morris,” International Review of Social History 16 (August 1971): 217–40, at 217.

2. William Carlos Williams, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), 110.3. For an argument that advances a process model of utopia with explicit reference

to Dewey’s pragmatism, see Erin McKenna, The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). For an interesting discussion of



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utopia as method, see Ruth Levitas, “The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Utopia as Method,” in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 46–68. For an exploration of pragmatism and utopianism, see Ruth Levitas, “Pragmatism, Utopia, and Anti-Utopia,” Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 9 (May 2008): 42–59. For a discussion of pragmatism and utopia that focuses in part on John Dewey, see Simone Knewitz, Making Progress: Pragmatism and Utopia in the Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey (London: Tunshare, 2005).

4. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 308.5. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (1922;

New York: Random House, 1957), 18–19.6. John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in Creative Intelligence: Essays

in the Pragmatic Attitude, ed. John Dewey (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), 3–69, at 63.7. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam’s

Sons, 1958), 5.8. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York:

W. W. Norton, 1995), 116. Although Morris knew nothing of Dewey and Dewey made only brief reference to Morris, their respective viewpoints are arrestingly resonant. In 1891 Dewey referred, somewhat vaguely, to “literary socialists who cluster about William Morris.” See John Dewey, “The Angle of Reflection,” in John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898, vol. 3: 1889–1892, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 195–210, at 202. In 1935 Dewey noted Ruskin’s “denunciation of the entire reigning system of economics, theoretical and practical. The esthetic socialists of the school of William Morris carried his teachings home in the popular mind.” See John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 11: 1935–1937, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 1–65, at 19.

9. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 288.10. Ibid., 268.11. William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings (1890), ed. Clive Wilmer

(London: Penguin Books, 1998), 228.12. Dewey, Art as Experience, 80.13. Sennett, Craftsman, 288.14. Ibid.15. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 369.16. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3 ( July

1896): 357–427, at 359.17. Ibid., 367–68.18. Ibid., 358.19. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916; New York: Free Press, 1966), 11.20. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 18.21. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890; Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1981), 125.



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22. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 18.23. Ibid., 23.24. Ibid., 18.25. Ibid., 39–41.26. Ibid., 37.27. Ibid., 23.28. Ibid., 92.29. Ibid.30. Ibid., 93.31. Ibid., 66, 95.32. Ibid., 94–95.33. Ibid., 67.34. Dewey, Art as Experience, 4.35. Ibid., 4–5.36. Ibid., 6.37. William Morris, “Art Under Plutocracy” (1883), in On Art and Socialism: Essays and

Lectures, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: John Lehmann, 1947), 132–55, at 132.38. Dewey, Art as Experience, 10, 3.39. Ibid., 38.40. Ibid., 35.41. Ibid.42. Ibid., 40.43. Ibid., 132–33.44. Ibid., 274.45. Ibid., 81.46. John Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” in John Dewey, The Later Works,

1925–1953, vol. 5: 1929–1930, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 125–43, at 127.

47. Dewey, Art as Experience, 104, 185.48. John Dewey, foreword to Henry Schaeffer-Simmern, The Unfolding of Artistic

Activity: Its Basis, Processes, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), ix–x, at x.49. Morris, News from Nowhere, 225.50. William Goode, “William Morris and the Dream of Revolution,” in Literature and

Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), 221–80, at 274.51. Morris, News from Nowhere, 43.52. Ibid.53. Ibid., 44.54. William Morris, “The Aims of Art” (1887), in On Art and Socialism: Essays and

Lectures, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: John Lehmann, 1947), 82–95, at 93.55. Morris, News from Nowhere, 193.56. Ibid., 61.57. Ibid., 47.



231

58. Ibid., 48.59. Ibid., 49, 48.60. Ibid., 52–53.61. Ibid., 52.62. Ibid., 53.63. Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 238.64. Morris, News from Nowhere, 94.65. Ibid., 49.66. Ibid., 50.67. Ibid., 93.68. Ibid., 98–99.69. Ibid., 158–59.70. Ibid., 111–12.71. Ibid., 200.72. Ibid., 123.73. Ibid., 133.74. Ibid., 53.75. Ibid., 211.76. Ibid., 164–65.77. Ibid., 47.78. Ibid., 127.79. John Dewey, Experience and Education (1938; New York: Touchstone, 1997), 44.80. Morris, News from Nowhere, 135.81. Ibid., 97.82. Ibid., 97–98.83. Ibid., 95.84. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 93.85. Morris, News from Nowhere, 65.86. Dewey commences a short essay on utopian schools as follows: “The most Utopian

thing in Utopia is that there are no schools at all.” See John Dewey, “Dewey Outlines Utopian Schools,” in John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 9: 1933–1934, ed. Jo Ann Boyston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 136–40, at 136.

87. Morris, News from Nowhere, 66.88. Ibid.89. Ibid., 68.90. Ibid., 68, 95.91. Dewey, Art as Experience, 3.92. Morris, News from Nowhere, 80.93. Ibid., 160.94. Ibid.95. Ibid.96. Morris, “Art Under Plutocracy,” 139. This way of linking art and work finds similar

expression in a number of Morris’s writings.



232

97. Morris, News from Nowhere, 105.98. Ibid., 221.99. Ibid., 201.

100. Ibid., 105.101. Ibid.102. Ibid., 222.103. Ibid., 81, 131.104. Ibid., 82–83.105. In an essay of measured utopianism G. A. Cohen outlines a version of these

two principles. He concludes that politically serious people must seriously examine the obstacles to socialism posed by capitalist power and individual human selfishness: “But [power and selfishness] are not reasons to disparage the ideal itself.” See G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 80.

106. Morris, News from Nowhere, 122.107. Ibid., 128.108. Ibid., 123.109. Ibid., 128.110. Artists influenced by Dewey’s aesthetic theory include Thomas Hart Benton,

Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Richard Serra. For example, Serra, speaking of one of his own sculptures, links perception to prior sensorimotor action: “[The viewer’s] perception of the piece resided in his movement through the piece.” See Richard Serra, Running Arcs (for John Gage) (Dusseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1992), 80.

111. Morris, News from Nowhere, 95.112. Ibid., 201.113. For a summary of these ideal characteristics of craftsmanship, see C. Wright Mills,

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 220.114. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed” (1887), in The Essential Dewey: Pragmatism,

Education, Democracy, ed. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 229–35, at 230.

115. Morris, News from Nowhere, 62.116. Ibid., 166.117. Dewey, Art as Experience, 25.118. Morris, News from Nowhere, 187.119. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 23.120. Dewey, Experience and Education, 44.121. Morris, News from Nowhere, 228.122. William Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil” (1884), in News from Nowhere, 306.123. Morris, News from Nowhere, 159.124. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 87.


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Crafting Experience: William Morris, John Dewey, and Utopia

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