Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

One of my favorite books, Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1974) The Dispossessed, tells the story of a scientist who critically narrates his experience of everyday life on his anarchist homeland, and the capitalist world he visits as a researcher. Moving between the two fictional sites, the ‘ambiguous’ utopia and its recognizable counterpart are described almost as a series of auto-ethnographic encounters. The memory of Le Guin’s novel was with me as I read Davina Cooper’s book, which asks how we might look at sites and spaces dedicated to a transformative politics, through a different conceptual lens than they initially suggest.

Across six chapters, very different empirical cases are brought together: New Labour’s late-2000s equality agenda, nudism and nudist organizations, the Toronto Women’s and Trans Bathhouse (TWTB), Local Exchange Trading Schemes, Summerhill School and Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. In asking unusual questions of these spaces and sites, Cooper explores how the everyday and the utopian intersect, guided by ‘queer’ conceptual lines. She sees these everyday utopias as ‘fruitful places from which to think differently and imaginatively about concepts, particularly when such thinking is orienting to a socially transformative politics’ (p. 11, my italics). While the concepts that she engages across the everyday utopias are incredibly varied, it is her unique analytical approach that draws them together.

Cooper’s notion of the utopian follows Bloch’s focus on ‘concrete utopias’ (1986) and contemporary utopian studies, especially the work of Ruth Levitas (2010; 2013). It is an ‘orientation, or form of attunement, a way of engaging with spaces, objects, and practices that is oriented to the hope, desire, and belief in the possibility of other, better worlds’ (p. 3). Across the six sites, Cooper engages with an ongoing critique of a utopian conceptual attitude as the creation of a future in which ‘idealized normative concepts are realized’ (p. 223). Central to this project of thinking from the everyday utopias themselves is the notion of following ‘conceptual lines’, which posits a reformulation of what ‘concepts’ mean. Here, they are ‘more than ideas, in that they are the movement between actualisation and imagining, take shape and can be known and recognized in more than linguistic ways’ (p. 41). These lines, as the oscillation between utopian imagination and multi-sensorial material practices, are crucial to understanding the ways these spaces can contribute to a transformative politics. This approach is the key contribution of Cooper makes to contemporary utopian studies; each site is critically examined in relation to specific concepts, not in the sense that they are ‘passive terrains spread open for analysis’, (p. 101), but for the ways that Cooper, and the participants themselves, understand this oscillation between imagination and material practice. How are these ‘conceptual lines’ drawn by different participants in each space, and how do they converge or diverge?

This process of examining these conceptual lines is undertaken by ‘mediators’ and Cooper acknowledges this book to be the work of an outsider, whose temporary and periodic acceptance within these spaces does not render the work ethnographic. However, she explicitly seeks to involve the voices of the participants themselves as ‘mediators’ through interviews and participant observation. Taking into consideration very different sites and spaces as everyday utopias, the book’s scope is impressive, but its form has an uneven rhythm. We begin with the suggestion of a tentative conceptual line oriented to re-imagining the British state through following the ‘touch’ of equality governance. We learn of fragile narrated conceptual lines around Local Economic Trading Schemes failing to materialize. We end with the exploration of multiple lines converging around Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner as a playful marketplace. Cooper visits many more everyday utopias in between. It is when the voices of those that inhabit and bring these spaces into being are most present that this book comes into its own. In such chapters, Cooper thickly describes the worlds that are imaginatively actualized and teases out the nuances of the conceptual lines that are forged. I want to focus on one specific chapter which exemplifies Cooper’s unique analytical approach, highlighting how she persuasively engenders new understandings of the everyday utopia in question, and how these conceptual lines might contribute to a transformative politics.

In a chapter on a casual sex space for women and transgendered people, a bathhouse in Toronto, the author’s deep and ongoing commitment to the site itself is made evident through the richness with which she describes the tensions and ambiguities of this ‘ethically porous space’ (p. 120). Focusing on the forging and emergence of conceptual lines, she explores the ways that this space re-imagines and actualizes different notions of care and ethics. Here, Cooper explicitly seeks to unsettle debates around feminist care ethics (FCE), a set of normative principles including attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (Tronto 1993, p. 127–136 in Cooper 2014, p. 101). She argues that in its rapid growth, FCE has become a solidified framework of judgment. Through focusing on three ‘care constellations’ (p. 105) she addresses the critique that FCE has paid limited attention to notions of ‘self-care’, and takes as a starting point the notion that it neglects sexual practices. Crucial to this discussion is how to reconsider FCE within a sexual environment where care is ‘deeply tied to commitments of both sexual freedom and community’ (p. 114), and where there are ‘more ambivalent, or multivalent conceptions of vulnerability or exposure’ (p. 115). Through the voices of participants, we learn how Bathhouse practices re-imagine vulnerability as shared and acquired, consciously made choices, and how the space is simultaneously exciting and educative, where ‘interpersonal power is managed […] through a care that is focused on consensuality’ (p. 115).

Drawing on past research, Cooper elaborates on how care in the bathhouse, as ‘weighted attentive action’ – taking and exercising care as an action that matters (Cooper 2009) – ‘supports ethical engagements’ (2013, p. 123) and provides the precondition of ethical practice. This constitutes a radical re-conceptualisation of care. As such, while the bathhouse as an organization ‘develops and regulates its own distinctive ethical temperature’, in ways which are challenged by experiences of racism, we also learn from interpersonal ‘stranger to stranger’ practices, which contribute to the ‘evolving ethics and morality of the bathhouse itself’ (p. 125). Cooper’s detailed account of the bathhouse as a space where ethical practice is intertwined with sensory experience and affect, not merely externally asserted moral principles (p. 120) emphasizes the role of uncertainty and situational responsibility, and is a great contribution to contemporary methodological debates within sociology and anthropology around situated ethics.

This chapter brings to the fore a key issue of the book, found across the varying topics examined. It is when her focus turns to bounded sites or practices that Cooper brilliantly evokes the oscillations between different imaginations and the material actualisations of the conceptual lines in question. There are incredibly rich discussions of the intertwined theoretical and empirical concerns, in each of these chapters. Through the Local Economic Trading Scheme, she examines how the imagination of ‘community labor’ and its actualization, amidst competing normative temporalities of the community and labor marked (p. 135), is a fragile conceptual line that is deemed to have failed to take shape. Through the Summerhill community school, she explores property as an orientation toward belonging rather than control, and these conceptual lines as informed by contexts such as indigenous people’s land claims (chapter eight). Through Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, where people gather in public to discuss and debate ideas, she asks how ‘markets and play might assemble together as part of a project of transforming what markets might be understood to be’ (p. 213), and explores multiple conceptual lines converging at once.

Some of the conceptual lines Cooper explores are problematic, such as specific state practices in chapter three, and property relations in chapter seven. As is recognized by the author, these are causes of tension for utopian attitudes and the communities in question. This opens up a crucial issue: to what extent do the imaginations and material practices in the chapters go toward a transformative politics? Whilst the six sites have been explored as everyday utopias (although she acknowledges their closeness to the ‘mainstream’), the extent to which they can be considered utopian inevitably depends on the reader’s understanding of transformative politics, and of contemporary politically engaged scholarship (see Osterweil 2013). All the sites enact and secure existing practices that go toward ‘another world’ for the author, as she has delimited it. In engaging with messy, nearby sites, she demonstrates a critique of the utopian as the realization of idealized normative concepts, and her argument that there is ‘no single conceptual line that captures what a practice means within a given context’ (p. 223) is fruitfully explored. Cooper’s contribution to contemporary utopian studies lies in this analytical approach. Her attentiveness to the complexity of these everyday spaces brings to mind Le Guin’s emphasis on the ambiguity of the utopia explored in The Dispossessed. The attempt to avoid simplistic depictions of anarchism as a political theory, and instead propose a method for fostering critical reflection (Davis, 2005: xi) might be considered to challenge dominant conceptual lines. Indeed, in focusing on the multiplicity of conceptual lines in everyday utopian spaces, Cooper provides those who have a stake in future-oriented imagination grounded in material practices a way of understanding the ‘movement from imagining to actualisation as a temporally extended movement that requires work’ (p. 219), as well as the inherent challenges involved in such attempts to bring the utopian into the everyday.