Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a Prompt

In the last few years I have come to the Utopian Studies Society ́s yearly conference as part of a smaller group, one that has its own parallel history in the left corner of the South of Europe and is networked mostly with Latin America. I am referring to the interdisciplinary research group Histopia, which has its base in Madrid ́s Autónoma University, is comprised of twenty-seven researchers from different institutions, and is coordinated by historian Juan Pro. As the name Histopia suggests, it was founded by historians. From the beginning there have been people from other fields, such as political science, architecture, cultural studies, and art history. The aim was always understanding utopianism beyond the study of texts, and centering research in everything that utopianism produces, such as social movements, political programs, and urban programs. In this sense, a premise was to understand utopias not as a footnote in history or a series of eccentric events, but as a guiding force that drives a history. This placing of utopianism in history was clearly announced in the group ́s website:Together with this focus on history, which departs from the more text-centered traditions of an important part of utopian studies, the other main particularity of Histopia is its decentralizing of utopian studies towards the Spanish-speaking world. And to this end, the group also founded the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias, which was created in 2015 to put in communication over 250 researchers, most of them from Latin America, but also from other places such as Australia or Japan.2The Spanish state ́s research funding programs have provided the bureaucratic framework and the material resources for the research group since 2015. Together with seminars, conferences, or workshops, the resulting publications have been linked with utopian literature, with dystopia, and with a focus on viewing history through the lens of utopia. One of the most recent endeavors has been a radically collective one, articulating a Dictionary of Utopian Places written by a multitude of authors.3 Histopia has also initiated several projects with schools, for the most part ongoing, and there have been many attempts to disseminate its work through radio and video projects. And since its founding, Histopia has tried reaching out beyond the Academy—an effort that is finally gaining success. In 2021 the international conference Intentional Communities: Concrete Utopias in History was extremely fruitful: we saw involved participation both in various interventions, and through activities such as streaming. Participants included people and organizations from social movements and from intentional communities.I want to argue here that the very formation of Histopia was a logical development from certain political triggers—and in particular, the so-called 15M Movement, a series of anti-austerity protests and direct-democracy initiatives that ignited antigovernment activism throughout Spain from 2011 on, culminating in the occupation of urban spaces (“encampments”) and in very large political assemblies. It is not just that the forces of activism were reignited after 2011, and that its inheritors came together with the Histopia research group; the very existence of Histopia, I am arguing, can be read as a consequence of the 15M encampment and its aftermath.In May 2011, following the example of the Arab world, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol was populated by a crowd armed with posters, slogans, and self-made banners. On the inhospitable ground of the square, anonymous persons erected an encampment so complex that it functioned as a miniature city, with spaces for preparing food, for nursery care, for rest, for legal consultation, for antiracist and/or feminist activity. All work was voluntary, and materials were collected or donated free of charge. This phenomenon was not limited to a single place: during the spring and part of the summer (2015), the central squares of Spanish and European cities became filled with similarly precarious encampments, people sleeping outdoors or taking refuge in tents. From autumn onwards, something similar happened in the United States, giving rise to Occupy Wall Street (OWS).The activist camp that occupied Madrid ́s central Puerta del Sol Square constituted a place of utopian practice amidst national economic crisis and grim visions of the future. Both in the capital city and in the other such camps, the daily activities served as both an invitation and as a prefigurative vision. The utopian discourse of the Acampada (encampment) took shape through the self-staging of everyday life. In the camps, day-to-day actions became hypervisible: sweeping or cooking, for example, were carried out in plain sight and in front of a multitude of observers. In this way, these mundane activities became militant gestures toward other possibilities for everyday living; taken together, these camps emphasized the value of community.Life at the camps was carried out under the gaze of passers-by, tourists, onlookers and the media; in fact, the camp itself became a kind of tourist stop. Through the attentive observation of journalists and the ubiquity of digital cameras and mobile phones, the radical gestures of camp life were quickly fixed in images that circulated through mediascape. Many of these pictures and videos captured some of the most popular chants and slogans of disaffection with parliamentary politics, such as: “They call it democracy and it is not”; or “No, no, they don’t represent us.” With its practice of prefigurative politics, the movement would fight that disaffection by creating a scene of direct democracy. Through daily “General Assemblies,” thousands of people learned a simple sign language or code that came from the antiglobalization movement and that had been preserved in the squatted self-managed social centers. This language made it possible, even in a crowd, to express applause or veto; to ask for more brevity in speeches; to raise the volume of a voice or of deliberations. However, in the Acampada, direct democracy faced a tangled set of challenges. Most of the people gathered had no experience with assembly, making constant pedagogy necessary. In Puerta del Sol, purely cathartic interventions abounded, exposing personal dramas or launching inflammatory harangues. Moreover, unlike a “normal” assembly led by a stable set of individuals, Acampada participants varied continuously, and their influx day by day was heterogeneous and changeable—as was, consequently, the sense of the community itself, as activities fluctuated around the square.There were also abuses of the assembly system: the veto gesture, which halts the decision-making process and should only be used in exceptional situations, was constantly deployed by individuals with little assembly experience–thus greatly slowing down progress. There were also misunderstandings about what was meant by an “assembly consensus.” In the face of these misunderstandings, assembly proceedings often deteriorated into a loop, the same issues being debated repeatedly. Yet despite all these problems, the encampment became a scene of populist splendor. In Puerta del Sol, a surprising and original phenomenon emerged: following the lead of the activists, the regular holding of mass public assemblies. For the duration of the encampment, the size of the meetings varied between 1,000 and 3,000 people. Sociologist Cristina Flesher Fominaya speaks of the astonishment of activists who applied the methodology of mediation in general assemblies on a scale they had never lived before.4But the dazzle of this powerful image also implied something of a mirage, as the very size of these meetings became an insurmountable obstacle to participation. Also, the extremely long duration of the assemblies de facto excluded those who had other responsibilities or for other reasons could not physically be there. Although the assemblies of the working groups enjoyed a more manageable scale, activist Gemma García Fernández affirms that she realized, sometime later, that the General Assemblies in Puerta del Sol during those weeks were not really assemblies: “an assembly of 2,000 people that fluctuates, moreover, that [is] not fixed, cannot be an assembly.”5 What were those massive assemblies then? And why did they become such a central element of the camp?As a resolute gesture of direct democracy, the role of the assembly as a place of debate and reflection, where concepts previously restricted to activist and/or academic spheres were popularized, seems obvious; some have viewed those General Assemblies as “a laboratory of democratic experimentation,” and the movement itself as a “school of democracy.”6 But beyond what seems to be at its core—celebrating the words and voice of the people—the assembly seems to have had other functions. Through repeated protocols and shared gestures, the assembly also took on the function of a communal ritual of cohesion. The spectacle of many various bodies waving their fingers in the same way seemed to abolish the differences between them, through the will to do something together: gestures such as the twinkling of fingers in order to silently clap brings the community together, as well as celebrating it. And as in all rituals, there was an element of theatricality, a playful dimension of rehearsing other worlds in the here and now. The heated debates about the best solutions to society’s problems generated passions that it seemed would have an immediate effect.Filmmaker Cecilia Barriga considered that in the encampment, “the great performance was the assembly.”7 Moreover, such a performance is also performative, an aesthetic intervention that takes place within real time and space. As performative event, the massive General Assemblies generated scenes that epitomize the very meaning of democracy. The use of the central spaces of cities for discussion, places normally used for tourism and commerce, seemed to recall the notion of the Greek agora, and the mythologized reading of it as a forum for decision-making based on a common consensus. This reference, which many activists made explicit, is problematic, though, as ancient Athenian democracy was already a system for the elite, with slaves, women, and foreigners barred from participation. The images of thousands of people waving their hands in a gesture of applause were powerful affirmations of the possibility of managing things differently. These gatherings belied the stereotype of people’s political apathy, a stereotype that justifies the very idea that political parties are needed to manage what collective disinterest would leave unattended.With its daily General Assemblies and continuous gestures taking care of the space, the encampment continued for almost a month, until finally, the very activists who were camping decided to leave the square on June 12, a few weeks after neighborhood assemblies had been set up in the different districts of the city. Before leaving, they carefully swept the square, erased the graffiti, removed the posters, and peeled off the stickers in a great civic performance. In the meantime, until they were removed in August, an Information Point and a monument at ground level remained in Puerta del Sol. It consisted of a small metal plaque with the text “We slept, we woke up. Square Taken.”From this utopian enclave emerged a social movement that took the name of the 15M Movement. After the camp, there followed hard years of intense activism that were responding to the dramatic conditions that derived from the government ́s so-called austerity measures. The year 2014 marked a moment of certain activist retreat, and 2015 saw different attempts to found political parties linked to the 15M movement. This included not only Podemos (We Can) but also another political party called X Party, which was linked with hacktivism milieus, as well as with various (and successful) experiments in municipal power.8 This was a moment when many activists were thinking about the possibilities of and limits to creating a new institutionalism.9 I believe the creation of the group Histopia to be part of this zeitgeist, in a very humble and academic version. Utopian studies are not alien to the currents of social change and activism, and as researchers we must remain open to an active listening. There is an important question in this field, like an insistent elephant in the conference room: In what ways can research in utopia be thought of as a form of utopian practice? How does utopian studies as a field articulate its practice as prefigurative of the kind of research, not to mention general, community we want to live in?Relating the birth of Histopia to this moment of the 15M activist movement can perhaps help us in this reflection. If social movements prepare the ground for thinking, what can we in academia learn from them, in terms of actual practices? Utopian studies requires a geographical decentralization, but also implicitly carries within it the need for a reflection on its own infrastructures: its modes of organization; hierarchical systems; the articulation of debates. The question, finally, of the identification between subject(s) and their object (in several senses) of study, becomes a crucial one

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