School of Social and Political Science

Introduction

Utopian and other radical experiments in living routinely confront charges of failure. For some critics, utopias necessarily and inevitably go wrong or collapse, since claims to create perfect worlds are delusionary – vulnerable to authoritarian ambitions and governance mechanisms. For others, utopian failure gives rise to sharply felt disappointment as attempts to reimagine and reinvent social practice falter. Failure is typically seen as negative, destructive, and demoralising: large-scale ambitious practices to bring about a better society fail to achieve their objectives; radical communities, established as shelters from the success/failure dyad of wider competitive society, break down.

This network will explore critical perspectives on utopia and failure alongside others that re-evaluate failure – conceptually, methodologically, and practically. While the focus is on failure’s relationship to utopia and other radical experiments, the analyses seek to have wider ramifications. Whether failure is understood as incomplete accomplishment, breakdown, termination, undesirable consequences or something else, its experience and effects pose crucial issues for social progress. One answer is to protect change and innovation from failure. Our network takes a different approach.

What if we attempted to think differently about failure in utopian projects – not as a sign of fatal demise, but as a prompt for revision and experimentation? Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s dictum “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, our network’s goal is to recuperate the potential of failure to advance thinking about utopian politics and research, building on findings that go beyond the celebratory mantra of “learning from failure”. Revisiting failure in relation to utopia can enhance our understanding of social change, of radical political practices, and of practical and affective responses to failure in everyday social life. Our network focuses on three overarching questions.

1. To what extent have utopias provided (imagined) spaces of escape from failure – for individuals and groups – by offering alternatives to the success/failure dyad of competitive main-stream society?
2. How is the propensity for failure incorporated, deliberately or unintentionally, into different utopian projects, from social experiments to the built environment?
3. In what ways may we think differently about failure, by engaging with various utopian projects?

Our network will address these questions through three interconnected workshops and associated activities, bringing together both established and emerging scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds (Politics, Law, Social Anthropology, Architecture, Sociology, Education and Cultural Studies), along with arts-based community practitioners at the Binks Hub (Edinburgh) and the Science Gallery (KCL). Among the key outputs of this project will be a project website, a shared bibliography as well as a special journal issue or edited book. As a networking initiative, our hope is to start building a community of scholars, activists and others working in this area.