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Cat Wayland

This blog post shares some brief reflections on the workshop, ‘Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia’, organised by the AHRC network ‘Utopia and Failure’ and hosted at the University of Edinburgh on 23-24 April 2024. Bringing together scholars from Utopian Studies and beyond, and comprising a rich diversity of methodological approaches, the workshop led participants to consider the relationship between experiences of societal failure and the utopian impulses that respond to and counteract these experiences. I was invited to participate as a rapporteur for the workshop, so this post aims to draw out some of the central themes and questions emerging from the selection of panels I attended across the two days. I have organised these reflections into three thematic areas: temporality; institutional constraints; and the affective dimensions of utopian projects. Through this arrangement, I hope to offer a glimpse of the dynamic, generative, and sometimes vexing conversations emerging over the course of the workshop.

First of all, an aspect that I found particularly striking was the way in which time and temporality emerged thematically across many of the presentations. This should not come as a great surprise, given that utopia is typically configured as a future horizon. Yet, the complexity and diversity of temporal frames both across and within presentations was notable. Juho Korhonen, for instance, highlighted the significance of (re)interpreting historical resources in order to construct alternative political imaginaries and counter-practices across other temporal and spatial frames. Korhonen’s presentation charted the sojourns of the semi-fictional text The Country of White Lilies. Although the book presents an account of Finnish nation-building on the Russian imperial periphery, intriguingly, it has found lasting influence in Turkey, whose political elites in the post-Ottoman period used it as a blueprint for advancing forms of cross-class, national cooperation. Meanwhile, Emily Jones’ invocation of ‘future generations’ as a subject of international law retained the emphasis on worlds to come, though adding a critical spin by interrogating the positioning of future generations as the product of necessarily heteronormative familial configurations. However, Jones’ turn to Māori epistemology via the concept and practice of whakapapa (a term that loosely translates as ‘genealogy’, but denotes more specifically a practice of locating and emplacing oneself relationally in an ancestral constellation) acted as a means of interrogating the limitations of a linear temporality. Simultaneously, it gestured to the importance of non-linear temporal frames for making sense of alternative practices in service of a better future.

A reorientation towards cyclical time, as well as to qualities of hereness and nowness, serve to disrupt what might be thought of as an anticipatory temporal frame and can redirect us to the everyday and the lived, as in the relationally intense and richly textured Chai-time at Cinnamon Gardens. This 2022 novel by Shankari Chandran, and the subject of Barnita Bagchi’s talk, portrayed life in a Sri-Lankan-run care home for the elderly, located in a wealthy suburb of Sydney and inhabited by a multicultural and multi-ethnic cast of characters. Through an analysis that lingered on the sensorial, relational, and embodied dimensions of could-be-utopian experience, Bagchi’s presentation hinted at shelter or refuge, both from histories of violence and from capitalist productive time in the present. A last notable temporal moment emerged in Amy Cohen’s presentation on teachers’ experiences of restorative justice practices in Chicago public schools. Restorative justice as a response to systemic failures of racial injustice, poverty and trauma offered a glimpse of a world otherwise, but one sharply qualified: Cohen’s analysis attended to the recognition that restorative justice practices require a great deal of time to effectuate. If these practices do have a utopian impulse, it is one that is profoundly constrained and perhaps resigned to failure by virtue of the trappings of increasingly neoliberalised working conditions. In other words, we cannot become utopian subjects (if indeed there is such a thing) overnight. The work required to make and remake ourselves and our relations with others is a costly endeavour, and time is amongst the most scarce resources.

The trappings that constrain utopian thought is the second theme my report touches on, and which I frame through a focus on the utopic role of institutions in a range of political projects. Throughout the workshop, numerous encounters between utopian thought and institutional constraints were apparent, both in terms of the institutions that fail and therefore go on to invigorate utopian imaginaries, and those institutions which co-opt or capture utopian impulses. Ann Mumford’s work presented the limitations of a consensus model of decision-making in negotiating international tax law, and instead proposed the preconditions for a model that might direct such interventions towards a more globally distributively just arrangement of taxation. Mumford noted that such institutional arrangements will ultimately fail and give way to different formulations; yet, their utopian significance lies in the inevitable oscillation between the ideal and the achievable. Neil Walker’s presentation on utopia as a heuristic in understanding the legacy of the European Union suggested that while fears and failures can compel utopian impulses, their institutional articulations can often fall short of their ambitions, though this isn’t to say that we cannot learn from such failures to try and make sense of our present moment. This more optimistic reading was counterbalanced by Debbie Lisle’s contribution, which interrogated productive failure and the attendant ‘learning process’. Rather than a central and indispensable part of relating to and struggling with others, productive failure and learning have been co-opted by neoliberal institutions to serve increasingly dystopic militarised practices of imperialism and domination. 

The final theme that manifested itself across the presentations I attended is perhaps the most diffuse and least comprehensive, yet one that incorporates an especially rich and provocative set of concerns relating to the kind of subject that imaginatively engages or practices utopia. Encapsulated by Paul Mazzocchi’s idea of conversion, or ‘becoming utopian’, this theme also touches on the question of the affective grounds from which such a conversion might evolve. Whilst left-utopian thought is typically associated with hope, it was a remark from Dan Swain about fear of failure amongst radical political actors that was most resonant. Working towards a horizon of transformative possibility alongside the persistent anticipation and fear of failure reminds us of the constant risk of closure. Simultaneously, the effort required to maintain such a horizon whilst avoiding co-optation and capture is a strain both on political practices and modes of relating to one another as political subjects in ways that prefigure more egalitarian and non-dominating worlds.

A closing question to pose here is how we are to contend with the retreat from heroic utopianisms, in which the demand for total transformation of the here-and-now renders itself inherently unattainable. Lisa Garforth’s presentation countered the totalising impulse of heroic utopianism with a turn to Sedgwick’s ‘weak theory’ and the notion of yin utopianism: visions of a possible present articulated via the broken, dim, dark and partial. Through this oblique strategy, affective dispositions of yearning, of frustrated attachment to future horizons, of truncated hope, appear as integral to the kind of qualified (resigned?) utopianisms needed to respond to the intensifying deterioration of earthly life in the present. In this way, a yin-utopian disposition releases us from the future-oriented redemptive arc of utopian failure and instead offers the means of imaginatively reconfiguring the present.

Cat Wayland recently completed a PhD in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh and works as a research assistant and tutor at the School of Social and Political Science.