Everyday Utopias

Everyday Utopias explores a topic that is vital but is too often overlooked by utopian scholars. It is best read in tandem with its 2013 predecessor, Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism, by Michael Gardiner (Bern: Peter Lang; see below). In a nutshell, Cooper, like Gardiner, argues that although utopian visions may be born in the brains of utopian thinkers, progress toward utopia is what counts, and it must be rooted in present patterns and possibilities. Lest my qualms with the book's execution overwhelm its value for readers, let me emphasize my enthusiastic support of its basic purpose and its promotion of the growing field of practical utopianism, using a strikingly diverse array of cases to stake out Cooper's position that utopias are for everyone and are rooted in the everyday experiences of both ordinary and extraordinary people.Her cases alone should attract a diverse readership: governmental promotion of equality in Britain, public nudism, a lesbian feminist bathhouse in Toronto, a Local Exchange Trading Scheme in England, the famous English boarding school Summerhill, and Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London. Although her explanations for why each case is arguably utopian vary in persuasiveness, all six cases do logically fall within the purview of the utopian thinkers explored by Gardiner, especially Bakhtin, Bloch, Lefebvre, and Heller and Fehrer, all of whom target the utopian implications of everyday life and two of whom (Bakhtin and Bloch) Cooper cites.Let us sample Cooper's eclectic argumentation in her six cases. Focusing on the Equality Act of 2010, she explores ways in which the British government's “touch of equality governance, as an everyday utopia” (45)—suggested by government documents that use such terms as “soft touch ... embracing ... [and] tackling” of problems (54)—“open[s] up more progressive and transformative ways of understanding the touching state—that is, the state that feels and that experiences, in turn, the feelings of others” (45). In this metaphorical reification of “an animate, sensitive, responsive state” (71), Cooper is suggesting a utopian/dystopian mixed bag, because “while casting equality allows us to envision a transformative kind of state touch, imagining such a touch poses troubling political questions, specifically, how touching-feeling should the state be?” (71).The chapter “Public Nudism and the Pursuit of Equality” continues with the utopian theme of equality but applies it to a generally discouraged, heavily regulated, and typically banned activity. Here utopian features include the signaling of “the fantasy of a better way of living,” the educating of desire, and the inspiring of a more natural connection with the world (81). Because clothing often signifies socioeconomic class standing, nudity negates that link in an egalitarian direction. Of course, naked bodies are not all roses, as (for instance) “nudism's early, highly problematic associations with eugenics and racism are well established” (83). From ancient times to the present, nudism as an acceptable option has been more available to men than to women, and it has long been marked by multiple ageist criteria. Nonetheless, “public urban nudism has the potential to contribute to wider forms of social dreaming and to visions of better cities” (97), the natural body suggests a more ecological perspective, and public nudism helps the issue of “equality of rights and entitlement come to the fore” (97).The case of the Toronto feminist, lesbian, and transgender bathhouse again raises equality issues, regarding gender (including feminist care ethics), sexual orientation, and, serendipitously, race, as some guests have complained of experiencing racist slights at the bathhouse. Utopian intimations were embedded from the beginning, as “organizers sought to celebrate the range and diversity of sexualities; invest nonstraight female culture with a more overtly raunchy, ‘in your face’ eroticism; and signal women's sexual agency to wider society” (103). Moreover, “as a queer feminist space, [the bathhouse] committed to modes of governance that were democratic, participative, and open” (104), and there “was a demonstrated commitment to an anti-oppression politics” (109). On the other hand, the sex is intentionally impersonal; as one volunteer reported, “The intimacy at the end where [the client] wants to hug and kiss me; it's not me, it's a persona.... It feels a little inappropriate.... You haven't really had sex with me” (106). And “some feminists would question the direction of [the bathhouse's] empowerment, with its celebration of fucking, erotic display, power games, and phallic simulations” (118).The case study of an English Local Exchange Trading Scheme (LETS) compares the utopian vision shared by such experiments, in England and elsewhere, of creating an alternative economy, on the one hand, with their actual failure to match the services demanded by members-as-consumers with the services that the members-as-workers were willing and able to supply. A secondary purpose of LETS has been to promote a dramatically stronger sense of community, which in turn might strengthen the alternative economic market exchanges. But the problems of community time and labor-market time presented a “centrifugal force in pulling community and trading apart” (131). Once again, the utopian theme of equality played a role in the LETS attempts to equalize the value of different kinds of work, but despite social pressures to the contrary, workers tended to default to the mainstream economy's unequal valuations of different categories of work, charging whatever they wanted to for their services.The chapter on the internationally renowned, nearly a century-old British boarding school Summerhill identifies its well-known utopian qualities of children's voice, empowerment, freedom, and political participation, but Cooper chooses to focus on utopian aspects of ownership at the school, especially ownership of space. Not only do “civic spaces and things tend to be governed by groups of kids” (177), but children can minimize unwanted intrusions into their private rooms or their individually built structures on the campus grounds and in the nearby woods. This valuing of private as well as communal property and space was unusual in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century communal utopias, but it has increased dramatically since the 1960s, notably in Israeli kibbutzim, Australian intentional communities, and European and North American co-housing communities. Underlying these various utopian practices is “Summerhill's foundational commitment to democratic self-government and children's freedom” (156). Unlike many intentional communities, the familistic and communitarian culture of Summerhill is “home to children and adults of very different backgrounds, interests, and ways of behaving” and “manifests a spectrum of relations, norms, and practices” (158), thus constituting an attractive model of the utopian themes of tolerance and diversity.Cooper's final case is Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, widely celebrated as a venue for free speech—and counterspeech in the form of veteran hecklers—on an extraordinary diversity of viewpoints. But Cooper shifts gears to focus on Speaker's Corner as “anchored in utopian studies' emphasis on improvisation, creativity, and play as key dimensions of change” (186). Although “talk is what the Corner is about” (188), this famous public marketplace of ideas also encourages playful interaction, small-group discussions of the like-minded and ethnically similar (coinciding with twenty–thirty simultaneous public speakers), friendly communities of regular attendees, and various forms of market behavior. The theme of equality reappears, as, according to one speaker, “a rich person or someone who is somebody famous ... can easily be put down by a homeless person in a meeting, so in that way there's an atmosphere that can undermine hierarchical power.... It's a very leveling atmosphere” (190). Far from perfect, however, the utopia/dystopia of “Speaker's Corner is a very male space” (190), and participants are relentlessly crude in language and often offer not just conservative but sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic commentary—all perhaps an inevitable part of an iconic space representing a free marketplace of expression.Peculiarly absent in Cooper's overall argument of her six cases as everyday utopias is any systematic response to the most common objection to viewing such admittedly unusual cases as authentically utopian (or revolutionary): Aren't they really just so many ways of siphoning off people's dissatisfaction with the oppressions and alienations of consumer capitalism? Don't they primarily serve to pacify rather than liberate?Because my sympathies lie with Cooper's basic perspective and with her attempt to fill in a serious gap in utopian scholarship, I found this omission especially frustrating. Let me briefly play devil's advocate in each of her six cases.Isn't the case of the British government's “casting equality” with its metaphorical “touching” of citizens merely one of dozens of examples of the corporate capitalist state responding to movements protesting arbitrary ethnic, gender, and other inequalities by lessening those inequalities that don't serve the long-term interests of the capitalist state while preserving those that do, especially ownership and control of the productive assets of society? Don't policies of affirmative action mostly benefit middle-class women and middle-class people of color while dividing and conquering the masses?While purposive nudism proclaims that the natural is superior to the artificial, isn't corporate advertising all too ready to commodify all things natural as a hip way of promoting consumerism and maximizing profits? In my own experience of public nudism, I have found its shocking or thought-provoking aspect to last only briefly among the participants. Nonparticipant antagonists typically have little trouble in shutting it down or regulating it so as to keep it out of the public eye (although a little girl on a dirt road broke the locals' conspiracy of silence and directed me to the Valley View Hot Springs resort high in the mountains of Colorado—just as her father rushed up to silence her!).When a secondary focus of a feminist, lesbian, and transgender bathhouse (primarily for lesbians to get sexual gratification from volunteers) is to close the gap with the dominant patriarchal, heterosexual bathhouses in the name of gender equality, I'm reminded of the Virginia Slims commercial telling women smokers that “you've come a long way, baby!” Similarly, a century ago, anticapitalist feminist Emma Goldman asked, “As to the great mass of working girls and women, how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweat-shop, department store, or office?” In short, is it sufficiently radical or utopian for women to gain equal access to oppressive roles or to compensatory sensual experiences that make the status quo tolerable?As a longtime fan of Summerhill for its utopian advocacy and practice of nurturing children's voices and empowerment via both pedagogy and political participation, I wondered about Cooper's primary focus on utopian aspects of property ownership at Summerhill. Don't founder A. S. Neill's daughter's personal ownership of the school and her ultimate decision-making authority compromise Summerhill's authentically utopian characteristics? The children's roles are briefly described, but the children's voices that have made Summerhill both famous and influential around the world are never quoted by Cooper.Regarding LETS experiments, Cooper wisely focuses on their failures as alternatives to capitalist currencies and markets and seeks to understand why they have typically not posed a challenge to the economic status quo. But, then, why feature them as utopian to begin with? Doesn't her treatment suggest that workers and consumers eventually integrate themselves into the capitalist economy? Why didn't she choose worker and consumer cooperatives, many of which have succeeded admirably (e.g., the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain and the Recreational Equipment, Inc., consumer cooperative in the United States), as a more instructive, though mixed, case study?And finally, aren't the often talented and sometimes charismatic orators and hecklers at Speaker's Corner—whose performances and interactions I have enjoyed—mostly blowing off steam rather than undermining and replacing our cognitively cramped and undemocratically degraded, not-so-free marketplace of ideas with an authentically transformed and liberating society of critical and creative thinkers? Some of Cooper's interviewees bemoaned the gradual trend of Speaker's Corner toward commercialization and spectacle rather than remaining a locus for the serious contestation of ideas.My point in this devil's advocacy is not implicitly to answer my own questions in a way unfavorable to Cooper's exploration of everyday utopianism. On the contrary, I wish that she had developed a cohesive and compelling set of answers of her own. Indeed, radical critiques of reformism per se as inherently system-maintaining ignore the historical record of inadequate reform leading to the “relative deprivation” of rising expectations followed by societal transformation, as in the case of the American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Societal transformation is typically preceded by a period of improvement followed by accelerating disappointment. So I believe that Cooper could make a stronger case for seeds of unconventional experimentation helping to motivate more profound and widespread change. A theme she does pursue across her cases is the purposeful as well as serendipitous building of community among the participants. However, except for the abiding communitarian spirit engendered at Summerhill, which lasts long after students have graduated, the communitarianism she alludes to in the other five cases appears relatively weak, limited, and sporadic.By contrast with what sometimes seems ad hoc argumentation in Cooper's book, Gardiner's Weak Messianism steadily develops a logical line of argumentation—seeking a defensible utopian alternative to extremes of value absolutism and value relativism, namely, a vision of “multiple utopias” or “a togetherness of diversity”—built on the work of previous thinkers such as Bloch and Lefebvre. Whereas Gardiner's purpose is straightforwardly to explore and build on the ideas of earlier utopian thinkers, Cooper purports to focus on six empirical cases that are germinating seeds of utopia. But half or more of her discussion within the case chapters departs from the narratives of her human subjects as she pursues the direction hinted at in her subtitle, The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. For research carried out over a decade, it is somewhat surprising to learn that “this book does not provide an ethnographic account of everyday utopias” (16). While her book “shares a concern with the contribution alternative sites make and might make to a socially transformative politics oriented to more egalitarian, democratic, and liberatory social worlds, the book is on the conceptual life and potential of everyday utopias” (11). “Uh-oh,” I thought, sensing the on-the-ground experiences of her subjects evaporating into the ether of theoretical speculation. Cooper's discussions of the cases are composed primarily of her own conjectures about myriad theoretically utopian potentialities inherent in them. What is often missing is a bringing to life of the utopian praxis of the actual people, her subjects, in those promising spaces.Cooper deserves credit for suggesting and in some cases demonstrating utopian potential and even actuality (in the case of Summerhill) in her empirical case studies. Perhaps a government's legal embrace of equality can lead to a utopian arc of rising expectations; nudism when joined by other naturalist inclinations might help trigger a growing eco-consciousness; a feminist bathhouse may serve to intensify women's broader demands for equality; new forms of children's ownership in a boarding school could heighten their awareness of its troubling ownership by and dependence on a single individual; LETS experiments could stimulate citizens' interest in economic alternatives more generally; and ten, a hundred, a thousand new Speaker's Corners might spring up to revivify the always dangerous message of Socrates to know thyself, challenge authority, and do the good. As a step in the right direction, I hope that Cooper's effort to locate the potential for utopian change in the everyday lives of the people will inspire other scholars to carry her project further

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