Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces - Rilegato

Cooper, Davina

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0822355558 ISBN 13: 9780822355557

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

Everyday utopias enact conventional activities in unusual ways. Instead of dreaming about a better world, participants seek to create it. As such, their activities provide vibrant and stimulating contexts for considering the terms of social life, of how we live together and are governed. Weaving conceptual theorizing together with social analysis, Davina Cooper examines utopian projects as seemingly diverse as a feminist bathhouse, state equality initiatives, community trading networks, and a democratic school where students and staff collaborate in governing. She draws from firsthand observations and interviews with participants to argue that utopian projects have the potential to revitalize progressive politics through the ways their innovative practices incite us to rethink mainstream concepts including property, markets, care, touch, and equality. This is no straightforward story of success, however, but instead a tale of the challenges concepts face as they move between being imagined, actualized, hoped for, and struggled over. As dreaming drives new practices and practices drive new dreams, everyday utopias reveal how hard work, feeling, ethical dilemmas, and sometimes, failure, bring concepts to life.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Davina Cooper is Professor of Law and Political Theory at Kent Law School at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. She is the author of Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference; Governing Out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging; and Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the State.

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EVERYDAY UTOPIAS

THE CONCEPTUAL LIFE OF PROMISING SPACES

By DAVINA COOPER

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5555-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................
ix
1. Introduction............................................................
1
2. Toward a Utopian Conceptual Attitude....................................
24
3. Casting Equality and the Touch of State Governance......................
45
4. Public Nudism and the Pursuit of Equality...............................
73
5. Unsettling Feminist Care Ethics through a Women's and Trans Bathhouse...
100
6. Normative Time and the Challenge of Community Labor in Local Exchange 
Trading Schemes............................................................
129
7. Property as Belonging at Summerhill School..............................
155
8. Market Play at Speakers' Corner.........................................
186
9. Conclusion..............................................................
217
NOTES......................................................................
229
REFERENCES.................................................................
251
INDEX......................................................................
277

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1995 Florence joined a Local Exchange Trading Scheme (LETS)in England's West Midlands. She joined to meet people like herself,left-wing alternative kinds of people, and to be able to tradewithout using pounds. Through her LETS, she got to know peopleand made friends. She produced homemade bread and jams,offered some decorating and gardening, and bought other people'sproduce and services, including a ride to the airport, dog care, andhouse sitting. Samantha joined a North London lets a couple ofyears later, attracted too by the idea of exchanging skills withoutofficial money. She gave people lifts, offered word-processing, andgained a cleaner. Eventually she left because few people took upher services, and the main thing she wanted, house repairs, wasunavailable on a scheme dominated by, in her words, alternativetherapies, arts, and crafts.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another experimental socialspace was in full swing. In 1998 a group of Canadians, dissatisfiedwith the lack of casual sex spaces for women, started a bathhouse.Inspired by the agentic sexual openness of men's bathhouses, whileseeking to develop something that was community-based, feminist,and progressive, Pussy Palace was born. It aimed to createa space where women and subsequently transgendered peoplecould develop erotic confidence and a more raunchy sexual culture.Bathhouse volunteers offered a practical education in analsex, finding your g-spot, lap dancing, and breast play. Carla volunteeredto lap-dance at a bathhouse event, the first time she'd everdone such a thing. She described the venue as warren-like, dark, confusing,and exciting. It seemed like a place of incredible opportunity, aplace to meet people and to be sexually visible in new and unanticipatedways.

Far older than LETS or the Toronto bathhouse is Speakers' Cornerin London's Hyde Park. There, for over a century, people have come toorate, to gather in throngs to discuss current affairs, and to listen. Anunusual space, in the sense that you can join unknown others in conversationabout politics and religion, stand on a stepladder and lecture intothe air, heckle, tease, and make fun of speakers or audience, Speakers'Corner continues to be a place that is especially attractive to those excludedfrom mainstream discursive fora. Charles is a regular, attendingmost Sundays to listen to speakers and enjoy their boisterous dialoguewith the crowds. But he also goes to meet Corner friends, other regularshe has come to know. They will ask how he is doing and about his week.With them he can express life's daily frustrations and get a sympatheticresponse.

Sites such as these are everyday utopias—networks and spaces thatperform regular daily life, in the global North, in a radically differentfashion. Everyday utopias don't focus on campaigning or advocacy.They don't place their energy on pressuring mainstream institutionsto change, on winning votes, or on taking over dominant social structures.Rather they work by creating the change they wish to encounter,building and forging new ways of experiencing social and political life.Because their focus is on building alternatives to dominant practices,everyday utopias have faced both disregard and disdain from those onthe left who judge this strategy to be misplaced. However, at a time ofconsiderable pessimism and uncertainty among radicals about the characterand accomplishment of wholesale change, what it entails, and howit can be brought about, interest has risen in the transformative potentialof initiatives that pursue in a more open, partial, and contingent waythe building of another world.

This book focuses on six everyday utopian sites. Alongside lets,Speakers' Corner, and the Toronto bathhouse, they are public nudism,equality governance, and Summerhill School. These are sites involved inthe daily practice of trading, public speaking, having sex, appearing inpublic, governing, learning, and living in community with others. Theyare also sites that vary hugely—in their form, scale, duration, and relationshipto mainstream life. Given the very obvious and considerabledifferences between public nudism and state equality governance, forinstance, it may be hard to see what these sites have in common, particularlywhat they have significantly in common. The premise of thisbook is that what these very different sites share is captured by the paradoxicalarticulation of the utopian and the everyday. Over the next fewpages, I want to map the main contours of this articulation and thencut through to the heart of this book, which concerns the potential ofeveryday utopias to contribute to a transformative politics specificallythrough the concepts they actualize and imaginatively invoke.

Since its early identification as an impossible kind of good space,the utopian has led to a range of literary representations, as well as toother kinds of materialization in music, art, urban design, and communityliving. Interest in the utopian has also generated a growing fieldof academic scholarship. While much of this work focuses on utopian"objects"—including novels, buildings, and planned communities(e.g., Kraftl 2007; Kumar 1987; Sargisson 2012; Sargisson and Sargent2004)—increasing attention has been paid to the utopian as an orientationor form of attunement, a way of engaging with spaces, objects, andpractices that is oriented to the hope, desire, and belief in the possibilityof other, better worlds (e.g., Levitas 2013). This orientation can take aconservative or reactionary form; however, within utopian studies it haslargely been tuned to the possibility of more egalitarian, democratic, andemancipatory ways of living.

For Ruth Levitas, one of the leading scholars in utopian studies, socialdreaming, longing, and desire for change are key dimensions of the utopian,along with the hope—or, perhaps more accurately, the belief—thatmore egalitarian, freer ways of living are possible. Levitas's work buildson the influential utopian Marxist Ernst Bloch. While Bloch (1986) findsglimpses of the utopian in a wide array of different social practices, includingdaydreaming and storytelling, he also emphasizes the limitationsof what he calls "abstract utopias," compensatory fantasies invested inso that the present world can be made livable. Bloch argues instead for"concrete utopias," which anticipate and reach forward toward a realpossible future. While abstract utopias are wishful, concrete utopias aredeliberate and determined (also Levitas 1990). "Concrete utopia can beunderstood both as latency and as tendency. It is present historically, asan element in human culture which Bloch seeks to recover; and it refersforward to the emergent future ... a praxis-oriented category characterizedby 'militant optimism'" (Levitas 1997: 70). The everyday utopias ofthis book form a kind of concrete utopia. While Bloch focused more onthe latencies of the present and the horizon of future possibility, everydayutopias share his emphasis on what is doable and viable given theconditions of the present. Yet everyday utopias also capture a sense ofhope and potential, in that they anticipate something more, somethingbeyond and other to what they can currently realize.

The dynamic quality of everyday utopias is an important aspect ofwhat it is to be a contemporary utopian space. While none of the sitesdiscussed is entirely spontaneous and most are planned or designed tosome degree, they are not the realization of a blueprint. Moving awayfrom an interest in blueprints has been a significant dimension of modernutopian studies. While many generations of scholars, politicians,activists, and writers have criticized the utopian for relying on a staticnotion of the perfect society that can be imagined and then executed(e.g., Bauman 2003b; Shklar 1994), contemporary scholarship and writingis far more interested in the utopian as an ethos or complex process,whose failure and struggles are as important as success (e.g., seeLevitas 2007; Moylan 1986; Sargisson 2007). In the case of everydayutopias, the materialization of a plan or idea is never a final putting intoeffect; instead it involves constant adaptation and change. This may bein order to keep as close as possible to the original vision, as witnessedat Summerhill School in seeking to sustain Neill's original vision in theface of ongoing challenges. But it can also be a way of responding to newdesires and wants, as with the Toronto bathhouse and British equalitygovernance.

At the same time, despite the reforms and evolution that highlighttheir temporal contingency, everyday utopias share continuities with anolder utopian tradition in their ambition and confidence. Trading without"real" money, going about one's business naked, running a school inwhich children don't have to go to class, all challenge basic presumptionsabout how things should work. Many everyday utopias are dismissed asbizarre and ludicrous, for they take regular activities beyond their conventionalparameters. Against the assumption that anything outside the"normal" is impossible, everyday utopias reveal their possibility. Indeedit may be the everyday aspect of the activities that most intensifies perceptionsof them as strange and unsettling as they offer an alternativemodel for doing the things people take for granted as necessary to do.Everyday utopias do so with confidence, refusing to view their activitiesas the "outside" world does. For participants, the practices engaged inare normal and right. Yet these feelings and perceptions of normalitydon't necessarily predate participation; they often come from immersion.In this sense, everyday utopias don't simply enact new practices, respondingto participants' prior interests and sense of how things shouldbe. Everyday utopias also bring about (or seek to bring about) new formsof normalization, desire, and subjectivity—from the self-regulatingchildren of Summerhill School to the active erotic agents of the Torontobathhouse.

In ways that resonate with utopian studies and utopian literature,everyday utopias are oriented toward a better world. At the same time,the movement toward the world that is sought does not take shape onlyin attempts to prefigure it. A key theme in discussions of the utopian isthe place it makes available from which to critique the world as it currentlyis. By creating a world at a (temporal or spatial) distance fromtheir own, utopian creators de-familiarize the world they know and inhabit;in the process they enable taken-for-granted aspects to be questionedand rethought. Everyday utopias also offer sites of judgment, eventhough this is not an explicit feature of most of the sites I discuss. Likeliterary utopias, everyday utopias largely oppose indirectly what existsand what is coming into being, by creating other, better ways. So LocalExchange Trading Schemes expose capitalist societies' seemingly unproductivedependence on scarce monies and fruitless drive to accumulateand Speakers' Corner exposes the inequalities of an inaccessible,corporate-owned mass media, but neither site focuses its time and energieson opposing what is. Rather critique depends on everyday utopias'ability to pose a more desirable but also viable alternative.

Critique through establishing something new lies, however, in a complexrelationship with the notion of utopia as an impossible space—the"no place" as well as the "good place" that the word utopia puns on. Whatit means to be impossible varies. For the sites I discuss, impossibility doesnot mean a lack of existence, for the sites are very clearly up and running.Rather everyday utopias are impossible in the way a liberal governmentpromoting equality may seem engaged in an impossible—because paradoxical—pursuit(see chapter 3), impossible in the sense of nonviable(as I explore with LETS in chapter 6), or impossible in the sense of unimaginable(as with the women's casual sex space, discussed in chapter5). It is because of this apparently impossible character that the sitesdiscussed remain largely (although not entirely or evenly) absent fromimaginings of their sector. In a sense, everyday utopias are social blackholes, absorbing those who enter but missing from prevailing maps oftheir field, whether this concerns the field of state governance, schooling,appearing in public, or having sex. Of course, one reason for theirerasure may be that of scale: the sites are simply too small to be noticed.Yet, on their own terms, many of the sites—Summerhill School, nudism,Speakers' Corner, for instance—have acquired fame or notoriety. Still,on the school-scape, clothes-scape, or discursive-scape, where one mightexpect to find them, everyday utopias' relative singularity—their lack ofintelligible, institutionalized, or visible connections and relationships toother practices and institutions within their sector—leaves them unseenand unrecognized.

In Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, Lawrence Grossberg (2010: 278)writes, "Everyday life ... refers to the uncatalogued, habitual, and oftenroutinized nature of day-to-day living, what we don't think about whilewe're living it; it encompasses all those activities whose temporality goesunnoticed." As the tissue of life socially lived, the everyday is somethingpeople and institutions (elite and nonelite) routinely and habitually cocreate—forgingroutines and responding to recurrent needs throughtimes of calm as well as times of social crisis. How do these dimensionsof the routinized and organized everyday cohere with the ambitious, impossible,critical domain of utopian social dreaming?

Within utopian novels, extension into the everyday is commonplaceas utopian inhabitants go about their daily lives. In this book, by contrast,a focus on the everyday extends into utopia. Here prosaic dimensionsof regular life—sex, trading, teaching, politics, public appearance,and speech—are performed in innovative and socially ambitious waysthat, by challenging, simultaneously reveal prevailing norms, ideologies,and practices. But it isn't just the character of the activities that makesthese utopias everyday. It also lies in their routines, rules, and commonplaceconcerns; their embeddedness within wider social life; their "hereand now" ethos; and in the way they open up the terrain of the everydayto deliberate refashioning.

Accounts of the utopian in music, painting, and other arts often implya mysterious, magical, tantalizing quality—a world that is glimpsed butnot fully apparent (Levitas 2013). While similar claims have been madeabout the everyday, there is also a sense in which the everyday confronts,nonsentimentally and unromantically, the mechanics and operationof regular, sometimes boring existence. This ethos of maintenance,of digging in and getting things done, is apparent in many if not all of thesites I discuss. It is a pragmatism oriented to survival and to doing thebest one can; of establishing, promoting, and maintaining internal rules,systems, adjudicative structures, and etiquette conventions. Such pragmatismundercuts any notion of perfection still residing within the utopian;as such it echoes the work of utopian scholars and creators whoemphasize the dynamic, improvised, often flawed quality of many utopianspaces. As H. G. Wells ([1905] 2005: 176) wrote more than a hundredyears ago, "In a modern Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection;in Utopia there must also be friction, conflicts and waste, but the wastewill be enormously less than in our world."

What makes the everyday, with its rules, procedures, challenges, pleasures,and anxieties, so striking in the spaces I discuss is the way such aneveryday folds into the utopian. To take one example, interviewing volunteersexual service providers at the Toronto bathhouse, I was struckby the commonplace character of their concerns. These women wereengaged in unusual practices, in the sense of providing (mainly women)with free sexual services and experiences, yet their concerns, for themost part, were intensely quotidian: how to deal with poor client hygienewithout causing offense; how to make sure they kept to time soqueues didn't build outside their door; how to end an encounter withan inexperienced client who thought she had found a date for the night(see chapter 5).

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822355558
• ISBN 13: 9780822355557
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 283
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile