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Ming Kit Wong

‘Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia’ is the first of three interconnected workshops hosted by the Utopia and Failure network (funded by the AHRC) which was held over two days in late April at the University of Edinburgh. As a rapporteur for the occasion, I was invited to present my reflections on the cross-section of panels that I attended, and what follows is based on the remarks which I made at the end of the workshop.

In this first workshop, the convenors state, ‘we seek to explore, positively and critically, the take-up and potential of utopian experiments to counter wider societal failings and experiences of failure’. Now, in conceiving of utopia as a response to, and potential antidote for, societal failure, I take it that an implicit aim of the workshop is to resist the longstanding identification of utopia with failure itself within traditions of anti-utopian thought. Let me begin by setting out this context.

One might distinguish between two prominent traditions of anti-utopian thought, one socialist and the other liberal, with the former originating from Karl Marx’s influential rejection of utopia. On the one hand, as David Leopold (2016: 132) has explained, the foundational assumptions of Marxian anti-utopianism are based on the denial that socialists desire, require, or are even able to obtain ‘detailed and persuasive accounts of what an ideal (socialist) society might look like’. On the other hand, the liberal objection towards utopia derives from the Cold War, during which liberal thinkers associated utopian pursuits with the dangers of totalitarianism. For Gregory Claeys (2020: 420-22), this association arose from a millenarian conception of utopianism which regarded it as ‘a self-defeating search for perfection’ that was ‘inexorably wedded to violence, extreme collectivism, and an all-powerful state’. 

Thus, as Mathias Thaler (2022: 56) has observed in his recent book, ‘we may hold apart two macro-critiques: first, that utopianism encapsulates a flight from reality that distracts us from the actual challenges we are presently facing; and second, that utopianism involves a dangerous kind of imagining that paves the way for social engineering and, even more worryingly, widespread violence. In a nutshell, the first objection states that utopianism is not practical enough, while the second one holds that it is somehow too practical, too seductive in its modelling of alternative futures’.

‘Beyond Failure’ interrogates both strands of anti-utopian critique by posing a key question: ‘Can utopian alternatives [in fact] be imagined and enacted in ways that undo wider cultures of failure?’ It is with respect to this question that I offer three general observations on what was presented and discussed during the workshop.

My first observation is that panellists offered a plethora of different, overlapping conceptions of utopia. Some examples include strong and weak utopias (Lisa Garforth); strategic, exemplary, and generative modes of utopia (Kimberly Hutchings); everyday utopias (Antje Daniel); real utopias (Adriana Ressiore Campodonio); communitarian or intentional utopias (Ana Maria Spariosu); embodied, prefigurative utopias (Mónica Catarina Pereira Soares); autotopias and heterotopias (Luigi Pellizzoni); and grounded as opposed to transcendent utopias (Laurence Davis). There is no doubt that this multiplicity of conceptions reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop: its participants came from various backgrounds in empirical social science, normative political theory—including feminist and queer theory—phenomenology, literary studies, and comparative literature. 

In my view, the most interesting presentations made a case for why certain forms of utopia were more helpful than others for successfully tackling societal failure, without succumbing to failure themselves in the ways that critics of utopia have suggested. For instance, against ‘strong’ utopias, which prescribe an entirely critical and hubristic transgressivism, Garforth argued that a modest or ‘weak’ form of utopia, which acknowledges the limits to, and unknowingness of, our future, represents a better means of theorising about alternatives in an age of the climate crisis. Similarly, Davis contended that ‘grounded’ utopias have the potential to reanimate and reaffirm the hopes and dreams of those consigned to the margins of history in a way that ‘transcendental’ utopias could not, since the latter fail to take the suppressed and latent possibilities of the present into account.

While these distinctions may be useful in specific contexts, I worry that the proliferation of different conceptions of utopia has served to overinflate and hence dilute the meaning of the concept. As also seen in the wider literature, scholars have identified utopia in various ways with all kinds of ideal visions, collective daydreams, imagined futures, prefigurative politics, and modes of hope. Although a strict policing of definitional boundaries is not always helpful and may not even be possible since there is no single, historically consistent idea of utopia which can be traced, I do think that there should be greater reflection on what makes certain desires, imaginaries, and practices utopian and not others. By conceiving of most responses to failure as utopian, scholars run the risk of effacing any distinctiveness to the category of utopia.

My second observation is that panellists focused not so much on utopian genres of literature or storytelling as on experimental and prefigurative practices rooted in the present. To be sure, utopian fiction remained significant; the works of Ursula Le Guinn and Kim Stanley Robinson were cited by Paul Mazzocchi and Joe P. L. Davidson. Still, most conceived of utopia along Blochian lines: as transformative possibilities embodied in real-world processes such as learning as opposed to fictional worlds or static end-states. Accordingly, presentations were often based on previously conducted empirical studies or fieldwork and frequently emphasised the importance of pedagogy as a utopian response to failure. (Yet, as both Krzysztof Rowiński and Debbie Lisle contend in their presentations, the notion that utopian movements or forms of learning could ‘redeem’ failure overlooks the wider after-effects of failure and in fact misunderstands the nature of failure altogether.)

Despite its value for pushing back against abstract modes of ideal theory, I nevertheless wonder if this close engagement with existing practices has limited the scope and ambitiousness of utopia as an imaginative form of thought. Indeed, as Davidson suggested in his presentation, what makes socialist visions such as Half-Earth utopian is precisely the fact that it is not a readily available option. The construal of utopia as firmly rooted in present, real-world practices seems to be a historical legacy of not only Marxian anti-utopianism and the subsequent Marxist rehabilitation of utopia, but also the domestication of the concept by John Rawls and other liberal philosophers who defended notions of ‘realistic utopia’ since the later decades of the twentieth century. Whether one should welcome this development is a question that ought to be confronted.

My third observation is that while panellists devoted much attention to proposing ways in which a utopian politics could respond to societal failure, rather little was paid to wider questions surrounding the politics of utopia—that is, what is implicitly being done or assumed when a certain mode of politics is described as utopian and whether this politics is always more valuable or effective as an antidote to failure compared to non-utopian forms of political action. 

In associating utopia with a radical or progressive politics, as Jamie Allinson highlighted during the workshop, panellists failed to interrogate what Peter Fitting (1991) once called ‘the dilemma of the right-wing utopia’ and overlooked the fact that many apparently non- or even anti-utopian responses to societal failure have been characterised as utopian. Indeed, the extent to which such responses can be meaningfully regarded as utopian and how far utopian modes of politics depart from non- or anti-utopian ones constitute, from my perspective, some of the valuable lines of inquiry that this workshop has provoked.

To sum up, ‘Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia’ raises several key questions for the future direction of utopian studies. What distinguishes certain kinds of desires, imaginaries, and practices as utopian? Should utopia continue to be closely associated with features of the world as it currently exists? How might one interpret the relationship between utopian and anti-utopian modes of politics?

Bibliography

David Leopold, ‘On Marxian Utopophobia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 54, no. 1 (2016): 111–34.

Gregory Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022)

Mathias Thaler, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Peter Fitting, ‘Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia’, Utopian Studies 2, no. 1/2 (1991): 95–109.

Ming Kit Wong is a DPhil student in Politics at Magdalen College, Oxford. His doctoral project examines postwar anti-utopian liberal thought.