School of Social and Political Science

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Oscar Horton Chandler

'…To Fail Otherwise': Reimagining Failure as a Means to Transcend Neoliberal Commonsense

Alongside utopian theory, I engage closely in my work with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, and those who have since developed his writings in a post-Marxist tradition. In particular, the idea of ‘commonsense’ is key to my thinking. Gramsci himself describes this idea as referring to “the traditional popular conception of the world — what is unimaginatively called ‘instinct’, although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition” (1971, 199). It is a pragmatic, socially and historically acquired, and primarily predictive form of knowledge, whose purpose is, in “a whole range of judgements”, to “identify the exact cause, simple and to hand” (348). Put another way, commonsense is all that we take, fundamentally, for granted, in order to navigate the practical decision-making of everyday life.

Commonsense and power are closely intertwined. What we think of as the dominant ideologies or discourses of any given moment, in our case here and now that of neoliberal capitalism, will always ultimately come down to what is taken for granted, or what, in Ernesto Laclau’s terms ‘sediments’ into apparent ‘objectivity’ (1990, 34). A number of theorists, each in their own way, have sought to identify key features of the neoliberal capitalist commonsense which plays a key role in structuring our lived reality (Hall, 1988; 2011; Brown, 2015; 2019; Graeber, 2001). It is not possible, however, to generate a full and exhaustive picture of the common-sense of our moment.

The reality of studying such a phenomenon, therefore, requires a significant amount of reflexivity and self-examination. It may be true that we wish to resist the status-quo, but the first step in that process must be to acknowledge that our existing understanding of the world is formed by and around the very dominant discourses we seek to oppose, in ways of which we cannot always be aware. I am constantly on the lookout for the ways in which logics of neoliberalism may be embedded in my own commonsense worldview. And it was in the spirit of this reflexive practice that I emerged from the Utopia and Failure network workshop ‘Failed Again’, wondering how it could be that while utopia had been a feature of my academic work for years, failure as an idea had always been something not exactly ignored, but certainly unexamined.

There were two key things, it seems to me, that I had taken for granted about failure until that point. First, it is inevitable and therefore, in a sense, unremarkable - something fundamentally out of our control. Second, it is scary - a catastrophic thing from which there could be no return. That the idea of failure had resided in my head in exactly this form should come as no surprise. These are, after all, ideas which are reinforced through so many of the dominant discourses of our moment. Failure, in a society which does not guarantee its participants even the basic human rights of food and shelter, but leaves them to be fought for through waged labour and individual enterprise, will almost inevitably be associated with the grimmest of consequences.

We see this principle reflected too in the language we employ on a day-to-day basis, not least in the discourses in which our pedagogy is rooted. In one of the first talks on day one of the workshop, Heather McKnight and Kirsty Lumm memorably quoted one of their participants as having talked about ‘passing’ and ‘failing’ in relation to their Autism and ADHD tests. And as Peter Watt and Kostas Amiridis highlighted in their fascinating talk on the utopian projects of Henry Ford, this fear relationship with failure does not solely affect those in precarious situations, as it drove Ford to follow his early successes with a string of increasingly authoritarian ventures. All this leads me to posit, albeit tentatively, that perhaps a particular understanding of failure constitutes a consequential feature of the commonsense of our moment.

Were this to be the case, this capitalist discourse around failure would in turn have consequences for utopian praxis, which I define here in Ruth Levitas’s terms as being rooted in a “desire to be otherwise” (2013) and, in turn, as the act of imagining oneself and one’s world otherwise. As came through loud and clear in McKnight and Lumm’s talk and ‘Academic Care Cafe’, as well as being a recurring motif throughout the workshop, a head-on confrontation with failure is central to the vast majority of utopian imagining. This being the case, it became increasingly clear to me that perhaps our first step in imagining our way beyond the dominant discourses of our moment, should be to attempt to imagine failure itself otherwise.

With this in mind, I set out to sketch a limited typology of utopian failure, extrapolated from the proceedings of the ‘Failed Again’ workshop in Newcastle in September 2024. These ‘utopian failures’, which make up the remainder of this blog, overlap and are closely interrelated, definitionally distinct only to the extent that making them so is useful to us as we try to describe and summarise them. The overall typology also has no pretences at being exhaustive. The intention is, however, that they be treated as a renewed provocation - a starting point whose inherent failings might in themselves lead to productive further discussion and development of what failure is, and what it could, and should be.

Failure as a constructive tool

This idea was present in subtly distinct forms across a number of talks, growing particularly prominent on the second day of the workshop. The first talk to invoke such an idea in full was that of Tamara Caraus, in which she discussed ‘The Inbuilt Failure, or the Idea of Perestroika’. In Perestroika, Caraus argued, a paradoxical idea emerges - one which conceives of failure as potentially, and at least theoretically, constructive. Perestroika constituted an acknowledgement on the part of Soviet leadership of the symbiosis between failure and change, centering a practice of “perpetual demolition” as key to the survival of the soviet state.

Comparable notions of constructive failure also came through in the papers presented by Nathaniel Coleman and Brian Carey. Coleman made the case for an architectural practice which builds social failure right into the structures it creates as a means to provoke and facilitate perpetual utopian praxis. Carey meanwhile sought to frame this idea within the context of ongoing debate in the field of political science, specifically around the value of using ‘ideal models’ for the study of society. The use of such models in certain contexts, Carey argued, still holds value in a framework that views politics as the practice of productively failing to reproduce ideals.

Failure as pedagogical practice

This refers to a failure which is viewed as an opportunity and a tool for learning. This principle came through most clearly in Maša Mrovlje’s presentation, ‘Responding to Failure: Rosa Luxemburg in Dialogue with Prefigurative Politics’, in which she outlined Luxemburg’s curious conception of failure’s role in revolutionary praxis. Luxembourg, Mrovlje surmised, came to see failure as something to be embraced, and a critical tool through which revolutionary movements might iterate and improve, as part of a broader process of transcendence.

This principle also came through particularly clearly in the work of Heather McKnight and Kirsty Lumm, who in presenting their work running ‘Care Cafes’ for women experiencing menopause, highlighted the importance of embracing failure in the creative activities they and their participants undertake. Sharing, demystifying, and de-stigmatising failure through this process, they observed, can prove a vital tool for reckoning with uncertainty, and embracing newfound possibilities - an idea which we were invited to further explore as part of the ‘academic care cafe’ which McKnight and Lumm ran throughout the remainder of the workshop.

Failure as subaltern space of possibility

In her paper, ‘Creating utopian communities of safety in the wake of a global pandemic’, Flora Renz drew attention to how the sweeping changes brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic had revealed the contingency of pre-existing discourses excluding those with disabilities or chronic illnesses from participation in work and daily life, while the pandemic itself also highlighted the vulnerability of these groups. These experiences, she elaborated, have added momentum to the already active development of prefigurative spaces and practices by and for disabled and chronically ill communities, which “present the possibility of re-imagining, and in some ways acting as if, society already values the lives of disabled and chronically ill people differently”.

Similar themes were also touched upon by Miranda Iossifidis, Mack Sproates, and Bethan Sproat, in their talk on ‘co-producing speculative climate futures zines’, with an emphasis on the inclusion of young, LGBTQ, and gender non-conforming perspectives, along with those whose political identities sit outside the mainstream democratic sphere. Failure, they recalled a participant observing, becomes something almost desirable in a world where success is not defined on their terms - “they want to fail because they don’t want a capitalist end goal”. In these spaces of anxiety and alterity, in which failure is an externally imposed condition, the idea of success is complicated by the question of who dominant discourses of success ultimately serve, and failure itself can become a refuge of hope and utopian imagining, free from the conditions that would otherwise hold it back.

The ‘absurd’ failure

In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ Albert Camus describes Sisyphus as being the archetypal ‘absurd hero’ as a result of his “levity with regard to the gods” (2013, 86). Sisyphus is the human who even as the gods inflict upon him the most terrible punishment they can imagine, finds happiness in the task they set him, just to spite them one final time. And who reminds us, as in Camus’ memorable conclusion to that essay, “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (88).

In his talk entitled ‘at the limit of the possible’, Adam Potts reminded us that truth and possibility are inherently tied to power, and what we take for granted as truth will always be determined by the dominant discourses of our moment. This being the case, Potts argued, it is through the language of impossibility that we can and should mount our resistance to power. Through this logic, potential failure becomes not something to be avoided, but dually pursued and transcended. The principle is not dissimilar to that framed by Lucy Sargisson, with her invocation of the ‘wise fool’ archetype (2012), as one who sets themselves apart from established truths and plays the fool to the end of ultimately defying that reality, or comedically failing in the process.

We live in a world where our understanding of what is reasonable or realistic is profoundly tied up with power, and follows the rules of the status quo. Whether it comes in the form invoked by Nathaniel Coleman as ‘finding the unfindable and defining the undefinable’ or in the observation of Walidah Imarisha (2018), cited by Phil Crocket Thomas in her keynote address, that there is a need for “spaces where we can be utterly unrealistic in our dreams for the future”, utopian action must sometimes take the form of charging into apparently inevitable failure with exuberance and joy, cursing reality as Sisyphus cursed the gods themselves.

Works Cited

• Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the demos : neoliberalism's stealth revolution. New York: Zone Books.

• Brown, W. (2019) In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Camus, A. (1975) The myth of Sisyphus. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

• Graeber, D. (2001) Toward an anthropological theory of value : the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave US.

• Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London/New York: Lawrence & Wishart

• Hall, S. (1988) The hard road to renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the left. London: Verso.

• Hall, S. (2011) 'The Neo-Liberal Revolution', Cultural Studies, 25(6), pp. 705-728.

• Imarisha, W. (2018) ‘Octavia’s Brood in the context of the history of sci-fi and social change; sci-fi as a practice ground for social justice vision and strategy’. Collaborative Future Fictions Symposium, Brighton, UK.

• Laclau, E. (1990) New reflections on the revolution of our time. London/New York Verso.

• Levitas, R. (2013) Utopia As Method: The imaginary reconstruction of society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.