ABSTRACT
The central assumption informing the following account of Sir Thomas More's Utopia is this: No equipment, no imaginary worlds. This statement appropriates Bruno Latour's lapidary formula, offered in Reassembling the Social: "No equipment, no rationality". This chapter explores how More's act of literary making depends upon humanist equipment. In this case, imagined fictional worlds are made possible by the available resources for governing the world. Utopia depicts humanism in action, drawing on, addressing, analyzing, and playing with the equipment the professional class of humanist councilors, commissioners, office holders, justices, secretaries, chancellors, and other governmental officials bring to their projects of governmental world-making. The chapter shows how the governmental aspects of world-making provide equipment for—as well as an occasion for—imaginary world-making. The very persistence and vitality of utopia as a genre should be evidence enough of the pleasures embedded in paraconciliar reflection and exchange, pleasures that survive and frequently intensify across media and temporal and spatial settings.
