School of Social and Political Science

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Martin Greenwood

The second workshop in the series ‘Fail Again, Fail Better?’ took place at Newcastle University on the 10th and 11th of September 2024, and carried the title ‘Failed Again: The Fault-Lines in Utopia’. The first workshop in the series, ‘Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia’, had taken place at the University of Edinburgh back in Spring. That inaugurating workshop had taken as its theme the ways in which utopias present responses to, or act as some kind of counteractive force to, failures within broader social realities. This second session explored what happened when the boundaries between utopia and failure are rendered less distinct, or are not present at all, when regarded analytically and encountered in experience and practice. 

Below, I’ve traced out some themes that seemed detectable, among the many trails of thought this workshop stimulated. Initially, these relate to the utopian impulse, how those acting upon it can get led catastrophically astray, how it inspires transformative action at vastly different scales, and how the smaller scale transformations it inspires will nevertheless have a world-shaping implication. It also led me to think about how present conditions require its world changing power like never before, but that this will mean carrying with us all it implies - including the possibility of failure - rather than discarding what might seem unnecessary in the face of such catastrophic urgency. This leads to thoughts on the need for a godly or beautiful efficacy: how might the utopian impulse be directed effectively into action against intensifying dystopian realities, maintaining its necessary openness to failure, without its failures becoming betrayals of what it represents?

The opening plenary of day one, brought these different scales of action, undertaken in service of a utopian impulse, into focus. We heard from Peter Watt and Kostas Amiridis, about Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s disillusion-borne and Emersonian-inspired attempt to create a pastoral-city-plantation in the Brazilian jungle. This misadventure was a spot of egregious colonial worldmaking, undertaken in service of a vision only ever realisable through mass exploitation and environmental despoilation. But it drew on a kind of yearning that is familiar to utopian scholars, and to anyone who has daydreamed about another way of living. The ways in which this utopian impulse can fuel a project that grossly betrays it, when schemes to concretise what it reaches for are devised, were here made markedly plain. In this same plenary, Tamara Caraus talked about a vision on an even grander scale: the under-discussed, root-shaking revolutionary philosophy underlying Gorbachev’s Perestroika project. This vision put into concrete action a desire to refound the revolution and shake it free of the dogmas and bureaucracies that had accrued around its venerable spirit and practices. This was also a world-shaping vision, in part an invitation for the capitalist world to undergo parallel transformations and rid itself of the accruals from its foundational exploitation and oppression. Here the failure of the project and betrayal of its utopian impulse arose through an inability to defend what Perestroika represented. Namely, a certain amount of rational, hard, yet worthwhile work, against capitalism’s libidinal feeding-frenzy. 

These world-shaping expressions of the utopian impulse were brought into contrast, in the talk presented by Heather McKnight and Kirsty Lumm, with work on a different order of scale. Throughout the workshop Heather and Kirsty hosted an Academic Care Cafe, inviting attendees to sculpt from cardboard boxes and other craft materials, visions of academia, were it transformed in a utopian direction. In this talk, they discussed their patient and complex work of creating Care Cafes, Creative Climate Cafes, and Menopause Cafes - spaces where under-expressed and actively suppressed aspects of lived experience could be shared among communities of understanding and support. These careful efforts to provide something so rudimentary and necessary, yet glaringly absent in society, had still seen their own measure of failure. This was in the limited ability, against best intentions, to fully provide for the specific needs of some community members - a limitation which had ultimately produced explosive conflict. This led to painful reflection on the limits of what can be achieved in terms of making a more-ideal space endure, when the surrounding society places such work under constant strain and duress.

Interplays of hope and disappointment at the macro and micro scales, of evident need going unmet, and the work and struggle of grassroots effort to address this, were all present in Flora Renz’ presentation. Flora discussed of the work of disabled activists who are producing practical responses to the still-urgent danger they face due to COVID, long-COVID and other respiratory threats. Presently, societies appear to be wilfully muting this urgency, treating the pandemic as if it belonged to another time, now bracketed off from matters of pressing concern. Yet in the pandemic’s first disorienting months, disabled people watched as society-wide adjustments to public transport, public space and workplaces began to be implemented, that could afford them greater safety and provide greater opportunities for inclusion. Often these were measures they had campaigned for over decades, and had been repeatedly told were impossible. The subsequent society-wide fading of protective, harm-reducing imperatives, and the reassertion of an excluding and life-limiting normality, formed the context of abandonment from which disabled people’s grassroots work of self-protection, and efforts to educate about to how make spaces more accessible, became necessary. Here, the utopian impulse arises at the scale of the body under threat, and through concrete action, reaches for changes that would make societies better for all their members. 

This dynamic resonated with a notion which had been raised in an earlier Q&A session. Seismic moments where the procession of relative normality in the global order seemed to rupture, like the pandemic and like the Global Financial Crisis, can bring an intensification of utopian hope. Such events present what seems a glaring message, a pedagogical moment which should surely, permanently reconfigure societies - tilt them finally away from catastrophe and towards justice. This hope surges in such moments, but then watches as the space for new possibilities falls into shadow, as their containing lid seems once again slammed shut.

Similar feelings were discussed in a session later that afternoon, when Jon Quayle talked about how Shelley’s poetry was fuelled by disappointment in the failure of the French Revolution. In Shelley’s case, despair at failure to change things decisively and at scale in favour of the oppressed, ultimately reconstitutes into a reaffirmation of utopianism and a sense of the need to be wise and kind about the possibility and significance of such epochal failure, when the forces allied against justice are so formidable. Shelley’s mythologically-inflected understanding of the nature of struggle, where failure and victory are bound up together, where hope brings no guarantees but must nevertheless be maintained, brings the question - posed in the session - ‘in a battle that lasts forever, is failure ever really failure’?

It’s quite apt for utopians to be in the habit of considering maximalist questions of temporality and of utopian work extending into temporal horizons as far as the imagination can go. The utopian work of exploring human-natural capacities, in the service of building ever more redemptive, ever more just societies, is conceivably limitless, with - at the very least - vigilance against injustice being imaginable as a necessary feature of a still vastly-more-perfect future. With this sense of eternity or endlessness about the work of carrying and acting in service of hope, a wise disposition might counsel less urgency or intensity in how this work is gone about.

But the hazy horizons of perpetual righteous battle are sternly foreclosed by present pressing realities: climate catastrophe, the real possibility that any sort of hoped-for future may simply run out of time to exist; the burning horror of genocidal violence unfolding live before us. These things might understandably make us want to tighten up our dispositions regarding valued aspects of utopianism discussed over the course of the workshop: acceptance of the pedagogical necessity of failure, encouragement of playfulness and experimentation, shrugging off limits on joyful self-expression, the patient work of care. We might be tempted towards a stern efficacy, focusing on the instrumental, rather than the exploratory or experimental. But as noted in Masa Mrovlije’s discussion of Rosa Luxembourg, such temptations could risk negating the utopianism this efficacy had been marshalled in the service of.

Another temptation might be to turn away from concern with the quotidian. Everyday life was a key focus of Mathijs van de Sand’s discussion of Lefebvre’s work on the Paris Commune. Refusing earlier Marxist renderings of the Commune as a failure, Lefebvre reads it as an enduring reconfiguration of possibility, a festival of the oppressed which is passed like a baton, or thrown down like a gauntlet, to following generations to be reactivated. For Lefebvre, such a reactivation was evident in the festive revolts of 1968. Lefebvre’s method of transduction - reading the histories and possible futures active in the present moment, and maintaining ‘incessant feedback between conceptual framework and empirical observation’ - reveals the sparking radical potentials in everyday life. This terrain of the quotidian is produced by but not fully controlled by capital, and is shot through with moments of disalienation, not least through moments of mutual care. The task at hand here, is to ‘durably reconcile the festive moment with everyday life’; bring the possibilities revealed in moments of revolt and refusal - and care - into enduring, sustainable and expandable ways of living. 

In my own work, reimagined public services are considered for their potential to become the means through which such a durability is achieved. This focus inevitably involves a reading back through neoliberal restructurings of these to fully understand their current degraded condition (See Greenwood, 2023). Understandably, there can be a suspicion that this work could lead to an undue nostalgia for a selectively-remembered, pre-neoliberal golden age of public services. 

For Lefebvre, as it was for Benjamin (2006), history is scattered with moments of utopian possibility that have the potential to be reactivated in the air of the living present. Reading the past through the lens of utopian desire, then, has some considerable support as an endeavour. But the temptation of nostalgia - that this reorientation of utopian desire becomes a melancholic and wounding task, distorting visions of how life ought to be lived - can be a real hazard. As Judy Thorne noted in a Q&A session, following her discussion of utopian desire and its fate among activists in Greece in the late 2010s, melancholia is what happens ‘when desire gets stuck and becomes undynamic’. A similar degradation of desire is visible in the work of the Finnish naturalist - and ecofascist - Pentti Linkola, as discussed by Markus Ketola. Linkola’s desire was fixated on a beautiful vision of a 1930s Finland, where possibilities for human-natural flourishing were, in his selective remembering, more vividly realisable. In pursuit of some kind of reconstitution of this selectively-remembered past, Linkola acknowledged and accepted that this could only be achieved through violence - a violence he saw as worth it, in fulfilling the ecotopian dream his degraded desire spawned. 

This violence is a sweeping away of the real hard work that needs to be done in the service of any utopian vision. This is work of having to live with each other and mutually solve difficult matters of justice, distribution and of making a sustainable human-natural world, at the interpersonal and community levels, as well as through the imperfect yet vital structures and institutions through which democracy and social reproduction at scale are organised.

Coming back to the question of efficacy: Peter Cox's discussion of a failed intentional community noted the inherent peril of Western self-conceptions of mastery and success. The ungodliness of these things was noted, with Peter reminding us, with a nod to Martin Buber, that ‘success is not a name of god’, and of Dorothee Soelle’s assertion that pursuit of success as the validation of activism is effectively “dancing to the tunes of the bosses of this world” (Sölle and Oliver, 2006). Utopia needs effectiveness, but somehow an effectiveness that eschews such senses of success and aspires to be - in this sense - godly. 

The way to this might be glimpse-able in the evident fact that some things designed to fulfil a certain task can be both effective and beautiful - they present evidence of a neat creativity in sympathy with, rather than expressing mastery over, the stuff of the world. These things could conceivably apply to our institutions - our public services - the structures that facilitate society, that resist and work to diminish the possibility of dystopia. 

And it can also apply to activism. In its jostling with the scope of available possibilities and, sometimes, its explosive reconfigurations of them; in the visions that rise up from the rubble in times of abeyance, defeat, failure; and in the care and solidarity and playful conviviality this can engender, as noted by Judy Thorne among those who’d lost the battle for Greece’s future; in all this, a beautiful efficacy can be seen. Effective not least because these things represent a survival of active, concrete hope in the face of something that would approach all the sooner but for these efforts - hopelessness. 

Of course, Linkola and Ford also sought something beautiful, perhaps godly, and that had world-shaping potential. Detectable in this workshop has been the sense that the difference between what’s required in action resisting dystopia, and action that replicates these dark visions and misadventures, might be found in maintaining a different disposition to failure. Hopefully this would be a kinder, wiser, more playful disposition, but one that nevertheless doesn’t lose sight of the gravity of what is at stake, and never shrinks away from the difficult work we represent to each other, in making a well-crafted world that isn’t founded on despoilation, oppression or exclusion.

Any well-crafted thing fulfilling its function beautifully and effectively, whether idiosyncratically, eccentrically, or with humble uniformity, represents a process - a workshop floor scattered with the dust and fragments of failed attempts and frustrated hope. Its beauty and its efficacy cannot be adequately understood apart from this process and from these scattered materials. This workshop raised important questions about what it would take to achieve a well-made world, and what it means to carry the desire for, and vision of such a thing, and the failures that can arise because the vision itself was limited, the desire behind it misdirected, or the forces assembled against it were simply too formidable to overcome. As such, this has been a valuable sifting-through of what’s scattered on utopia’s workshop floor. 

Bibliography

• Benjamin, W. (2006) ‘On the Concept of History.’ In Eiland, H. and Jennings, M. W. (eds) Walter Benjamin : selected writings. Vol. 4 Vol. 4. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, pp. 389–400.
• Greenwood, M. (2023) ‘Real Utopia as a Method? Utopian-Sociological Paths from Jameson’s Universal Army to a Postcapitalist Post Office.’ Sociology, 57(2).
• Sölle, D. and Oliver, D. L. (2006) Dorothee Soelle: essential writings. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books