This was a workshop within the AHRC ‘Fail Again, Fail Better? Recuperating Failure in Utopian Politics and Research’ project’s first of three conferences, entitled ‘Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia’. In this workshop we worked with conference participants using poetry and creative writing to explore the wider conference themes of utopia and failure.
The poetry and writing that is displayed as you walk around the outside of the building is from the Edinburgh Utopia and Failure workshop run by Dr Jimmy Turner, Dr Autumn Roesch Marsh and Dr Marisa De Andrade from Binks Hub.
You can read the texts below or view them on the outside of the Metasteps Care Cafe
You can read more about the project here.
utopia is
by Jimmy Turner
u-to-pi-a – is
the – fee-ling – that – I – find – when
my – spir-it – ex-pands
I invite you to craft your own utopia is haiku-style poem starting from the first line u-to-pi-a – is
Dreams of utopia take me to the edge
By Autumn Roesch-Marsh
Inspired by ‘From Blossoms’ by Li-Young Lee
I stand at
the edge. The
vista stetches to its own bend.
My heart falls in.
I want to reach out and touch the
beginning and the end, the lost road.
I am where?
This is we.
The whole of me turned,
hopeful and terrified moving toward
Utopia 10 and Happiness for ALL
Brian A. McGrail
My office is at Room 462, Block U, 1360 Corbusier Boulevard. I am dashing back since tomorrow is launch day of our latest attempt to end the history of the world, correctly.
”Utopia 10”, as the new plan is known, has taken 25 years to research and formulate. We started out once ALL had agreed “Utopia 9” is failing. Not everyone’s happy and community division will, once more, make itself felt and become detectable. Whilst the Makers of Charts reckon ‘the Decline’, into noticeable conflict followed by termination of progress, may take several generations (up to the 5th decade of the 33rd century) ALL have agreed to proceed with a new plan.
This time, like the last, will be different. Every plan for utopia is. The Plan Institute now has centuries of data, knowledge, and insight, banked from “trial and error”, upon which ALL can draw to ensure each subsequent plan will be better than the previous one – always edging towards the perfection of post-history. It is a matter of self-evident truth that the ancients (Plato, More, Fourier, Owen, Wells) failed to plan properly, in a socially and politically ‘correct’ manner. They had confined their designs to “headspace” and the internal conversation within one “thinker” who had a partial and class-biased perspective on society and its future. Hence, the thoughts of “others” were squeezed out, especially when the ideas of the “thinker” inspired and then infected the headspace of numerous “others”. Yet, like a strain of bacteria in a bar of chocolate, an “other” always arose!
My job within the Plan Institute is that of data analyser and partiality report writer. Higher grades design the entire research process (and I aim to be a higher grade some day) whilst lower grades go out and do the necessary interrogation work: what makes you happy?; what will make you happy?; and how could you be happier? Through cumulative previous plans the entire process has been refined and made not only fool proof but liar and cheat proof. No matter who you are, nor what ‘sectionality’ you identifying with, or have been nurtured into, the Diversity Committee’s Mandatory Consultation Survey will take your views into “consideration”, and produce a plan for ALL.
And “Utopia 9” had been perfect. Report after report across the decades indicated that ALL were happy. And as life follows art, so it was so! That was the case up until I started working for the bureau of analysis. Luckily, I was the one to discover the first anomalies and compile the initial report on disaffection – not ALL were happy.
The higher ups designated the emerging cohort of dissent as the ‘Let Live’ movement, since it transpired that their main complaint was they should be allowed to live outside the plan. The key slogan emerging from my data filtration was ‘de-rationalise the plan’. The Let Lives were othering the plan for “Utopia 9”. Not feeling its flow of benign dictatorship, they were repositioning the plan as a form of coercion, something the plan was never meant to be.
ALL organised an information hunt, aimed at subsuming data from Let Lives into a new plan (“Utopia 10”), and after 25 years of hard work we are about to publish!
What ALL were not aware of was the real reason dissent first appeared in one of my reports. This evening I am dashing back to the office to enter the first batch in a new series of false data, which does not reflect the actual survey results (where 100% are ‘happy’ with the new plan).
It will take time, but eventually “Utopia 10” will begin to crack, even if this happens after my time. Yet, I know my life is more enjoyable, spontaneous, and interesting by not being another component of “Utopia 10”! As I once penned in poetic form:
Utopia is for me-
The best place to ever be-
Beyond the present.
Now the new plan is present, it is no longer the best place ‘to be’.
Untitled
Arianna Preite
When I started writing, I was very young and filled pages and pages of diaries and notebooks with stories, drawings, and invented tales full of dragons, fairies, witchcraft, and spells. I remember my favourite game was a sort of deck of cards with all the elements of a good fairy tale, and you could play by inventing and associating your own characters starting from the ones suggested by the cards. During high school, having attended an art school, writing and reading remained parallel places to be visited only out of passion and never out of obligation, still full of imagination and, in hindsight, even utopia. Enrolling in the Faculty of Humanities, I imagined daily visits to these creative realms, expecting the same enthusiasm. Instead, I discovered a world where literature was governed by rules, where words were dissected one by one, and where technicalities dominated even imaginary worlds’ meanings.
I believe I stopped inventing stories the day I started studying them. Involvement in political spaces further distanced me, reinforcing the binary notion that literature is feminine and politics masculine—forcing a complete separation from one to engage in the other. Discovering utopia brought me back to literature as the essential centre for understanding and acting in the world. This realization made me aware that, although I never stopped writing, I primarily wrote using notions and theories, gradually forgetting how to craft something personal or imaginative. Each attempt now confronts me with a kind of failure: the inability to relate easily to something that had once been so familiar to me.
I firmly believe in writing and storytelling, in the exercises of invention and imagination, but I no longer know how to tell my own stories. Nevertheless, I strive daily to rediscover a creative dimension that positively stimulates me: my doctoral project currently takes the form of a gigantic collage on the wall of my room, where I collect pieces of book pages, drawings, maps of imaginary places, and thoughts on utopia. Almost monthly, alongside friends and comrades from various collectives, we organize workshops that encourage utopian methods and practices, challenging daily impositions and fostering collective creation and imagination, aiming to rediscover that innate ability we all feel we have lost at some point.
Despite all these frequent attempts, I postponed writing this creative exercise for a long time, hoping to eventually invent a short utopian tale full of magic and hope. However, I concluded that this chaos of thoughts perhaps better embodies my current utopia: a reflection on lost fragments of the past, an exploration of what I wish to see differently both around and within me. Attempting to bridge this realm of impossibility and failure feels, in itself, a utopian impulse.
From Failure to Anticipatory Failure – What is Failure?
Heather McKnight – from roundtable 17 March 2022
Failure is when we break our own rules and fail to meet our own standards
Failure is when we fail to notice these rules and standards are part of a collective construct dependent on our shared experiences and interactions
Failure is sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, discriminatory economic practices, and exclusionary language; failure is academia
Failure is where we forget who we are referencing, or cannot or do not try to recognise the conditioned origination of what we are doing and saying
Failure is when we break from the guidance and fall short of expectations (of family, friends, social groups, political groups, employers, the state etc.)
Failure occurs when we fail to notice the rules and act as if they do not exist, whether these are written, unwritten, or emergent, as if they arise in intervention of the very act we are in the process of undertaking.
Failure, as such, is impossible to avoid, we must embrace its possibility, how it can prefigure something new through the destruction of our work, our confidence, or our relations.
For many at this roundtable involved in current strike action, failure is when we have to resort to a strike in the first place, for others it might be when we can’t afford to strike, or we are too tired, ill or despondent to make it to the protest, or when we fail to engage with people that pass by our pickets as their eyes glaze over…
Failure makes us precarious in the workplace, in relationships, in the home, it can render us increasingly vulnerable, whether by making us visible or invisible
Failure is feminist, where the personal is political
Failure is when we fail to meet a social norm; failure can be resistance, in fact some resistance requires failure in its prefiguration
Failure becomes a utopian horizon when we stumble and fall, only to discover a new perspective as we try to stand once more, or even see the sky as we roll over in compliance
Failure is when we risk doing things wrong to make things happen, to create change, because we can manage no other way
Given the prevalence of failure, what does it mean to anticipate these failures as we give words to them, as we share our failure?
When we anticipate failure collectively, it need not slow us down, or shut us out, but allow us to know each other through mutual vulnerability.
To anticipate failure with each other is to trust each other, to anticipate failure is to be kind, to anticipate failure is to learn, to teach, and not to assume.
To anticipate failure is to strive for collectively agreed rules and policies, visible and malleable, to guide us as we can fail to share an understanding otherwise
To anticipate failure is the constant writing and rewriting of the rules and tearing down the expectations of these created rules and emerging norms as they fail to meet our new ideals
To anticipate failure is to be kind to each other because we all fail; to anticipate this failure is to use that to allow failure to fortify and educate hope.
To anticipate failure is to ask about each other’s boundaries because we are strangers to each other
To anticipate failure is to challenge each other without destroying each other, ethics at the edge of anxiety
To anticipate failure is to fail at anticipating failure as we constantly step into our own blind spot.
To anticipate failure together is to voice our collective daydream as we try to intervene in an imagined future, as social beings, workers, activists, a connected species being.
In these dark times of climate crisis, the pandemic and ongoing wars and genocides, to anticipate failure is to hope, as it is to anticipate that we have a future, that we are still here to fail and to anticipate.