Fail Again, Fail Better? Recuperating Failure in Utopian Politics and Research

The aim of this network and its activities is to re-evaluate the place of failure in utopia - by which we include both utopian fictional narratives, and radical experiments in living and governing. Specifically, we will explore the contribution that failure makes to utopia so that breakdown, rupture, and unachieved goals are not seen only as limits on action, so failure can support utopian thinking and practice rather than undermine it. The network and activities approach the relationship between utopia and failure in three interrelated ways.

(1) Utopian ideas and communities are seen as providing relief and shelter from the competitive dyad of mainstream life, where some people get characterised as failures while others are characterised as successful (or as achievers).

(2) Failure is seen to happen to utopian and radical experiments, when they break down, terminate their activities, or simply fail to achieve their ambition.

(3) failure can be built into organised utopian and radical activities to protect other, more important ends. This can involve creating deliberate fault-lines or 'crumple zones'; it can also include deliberative and affective processes of self-critique.

Re-conceptualising how failure is understood and enacted so as to foreground its productive function involves a range of strategies that the network will explore. These include shifts in temporal and spatial scale to re-evaluate events (e.g., failures may look different over a longer timeframe), and exploration of how innovative ideas that may have been abandoned get re-adopted across time and space.

The network will also investigate the activist, affective and organisational responses that feelings of failure generate. These range from feelings of discouragement that lead innovative projects to be dropped to remaking and revising everyday utopias, prompted by the learning that perceived failures in achieving sought-after goals can generate.

Finally, the network will explore what a utopian ethos towards failure might entail. This could include kindness and care towards both collective and individual experiences of failing (in the pursuit of radical innovation and utopian practices). It could also include approaching failure in new ways shaped by a refusal, collectively and individually, to win.

Thus, re-evaluating and reconceptualising failure also turns a critical light on success and winning. These are qualities or achievements that are typically viewed positively in our society. Adopting a utopian, more positive ethos towards failure, by contrast, can support trying things out (DIY politics or tinkering), resist the use of failure as a shame-label that discourages attempts whose outcome is uncertain, and support 'amateur' and counter-intuitive practices, including through play or through experiments that will necessarily fail.