A Non-optimized Utopia

Abstract

The article details how German artist Johannes Paul Raether performatively explores utopia as something that cannot be blueprinted but evolves in utopian actions. Whether infiltrating IKEA branches with sixty collaborative shoppers, performing a ritual as the witch Protectorama at the Berliner Apple store on Kurfürstendamm, intervening at an Icelandic aluminium smelter or a commercial surrogacy clinic in Anand, Gujarat, India, Raether creates unpredictable encounters between people, contexts and materials. The article argues that these encounters work through affective estrangement that facilitates a utopian education of desire. They escape recognition and make reactions in preconceived patterns impossible.

The article’s focus is set on Raether’s identity Transformella and two performances that concern her proposed ‘repro-communal reprovolution’ (Raether 2017). Transformella addresses aspects of both social and biological reproduction in her advocacies for collective parenting and an appropriation of reproductive technologies to unfamiliar ends. In one of the performances discussed in the article, she urges the participants to merge their genes in an act that, I argue, conjures what José Esteban Muñoz described as a ‘we’ that is not yet conscious. In striving for diversity and alternative reproduction methods, the act subverts reproductive utopias which aim at ‘optimization’ or ‘human enhancement’. The article emphasizes the implied radicality and contemporary relevance of Raether’s asking what a body can do as an open question – rather than enquiring into what it can do best. It explores the potential – and risk – associated with a conception of utopia as a preliminary ‘doing’.

Notes

1 In what follows, my understanding of affects is informed by O’Sullivan who draws on Massumi when he describes them as ‘moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter’. Following Spinoza, O’Sullivan continues: ‘we might define affect as the effect another body, for example an art object, has upon my own body’ (2001: 126).

2 Miwon Kwon proposes that ‘our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed, physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social, economic, cultural and political processes’ (2002: 10).

3 The Deleuzian concept of a ‘body without organs’ articulates this desire.

4 The citations in this section are taken from the performance listed as Raether (2013).

5 For a differently focused critical scrutiny of surrogacy that interestingly contributes to the feminist tradition of re-imagining all pregnancy as work under capitalism, see Lewis (2019). For ‘Wages for housework’ as a feminist social movement, see one of the campaign’s central texts: Federici (2018 [1975]).

6 Or, we might add, ‘potentiality’, given that Muñoz adopts the same Aristotelian distinction between ‘possibility’ and ‘potentiality’ that I will shortly refer to in relation to Daniel Sack’s work. Muñoz continues to write: ‘Performance, seen as utopian performativity, is imbued with a sense of potentiality’ (2009: 99).