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Utopia, Breakdown, Repair: Failure and Success in Social Dreaming

2023; Routledge; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/07393148.2023.2235211

1469-9931

Mathias Thaler,

Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems

AbstractA common charge against utopianism is that any attempt to create blueprints for a better future disregards a basic fact: humans’ proclivity for failure. In response, defenders of social dreaming have argued that failure can become generative, once we abandon the perfectionism that ostensibly inheres in utopian visions. Building on this revaluation, the paper applies a crucial lesson from engineering and design studies—that often artificial failure modes are required to enhance the safety of tools and machines. To flesh out this point, I turn to utopian fiction and discuss Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital-trilogy, which rejects techno-optimism about our climate-changed world, yet hails the transformative potential of an anti-capitalist scientific community. Ultimately, the paper claims that, if we cannot have success in addressing the climate emergency without committing serious mistakes, then one (but clearly not the only) path forward is to imaginatively prefigure the faultlines along which ecomodernist dreams for a “good Anthropocene” might rupture.Keywords: Climate emergencydesign and engineering studiesecomodernismfailureKim Stanley Robinsonperfectionismutopia AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank the members of the International Relations Research Group in Edinburgh, as well as Davina Cooper, Mihaela Mihai, and the journal’s two referees for valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Douglas Murphy, Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture (London; New York, NY: Verso, 2016).2 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).3 Mike Hulme, Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case against Climate Engineering, E-book, New Human Frontiers Series (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). Needless to say, the deeper causes of our addiction to fossil fuels are related to the global capitalist system.4 “On Being Conservative,” in Rationalism in Politics: And Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), 168–96.5 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, E-book (London: Penguin Books, 2011), para. 7.56.6 Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), 8.7 Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?,” Science Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (1982): 153; See also: Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London; New York, NY: Verso, 2009), 361.8 In line with Sargent’s influential definition, I use “social dreaming” synonymously with utopianism. See “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37.9 Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1984).10 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York, NY: Verso, 2005), xiii.11 Henry Petroski, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 49.12 Mathias Thaler, “Hope Abjuring Hope: On the Place of Utopia in Realist Political Theory,” Political Theory 46, no. 5 (2018): 671–97, https://doi.org/10/gfck5k; Enzo Rossi, “Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible,” Constellations 26, no. 4 (2019): 638–52, https://doi.org/10/gg3mqv; Benjamin L. McKean, “What Makes a Utopia Inconvenient? On the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Realist Orientation to Politics,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 4 (November 2016): 876–88, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055416000460.13 Anne Fremaux, After the Anthropocene (New York, NY: Springer, 2019); Anne Fremaux and John Barry, “The ‘Good Anthropocene’ and Green Political Theory: Rethinking Environmentalism, Resisting Eco-Modernism,” in Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking, ed. Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 171–90, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108646673.009; Samuel Alexander and Jonathan Rutherford, “A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency without Sufficiency Is Lost,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance, ed. Agni Kalfagianni, Doris Fuchs, and Anders Hayden (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 231–41.14 Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. Utopianism and Political Theory.15 Levitas and Sargisson are not the only commentators who have made this claim about utopia being opposed to perfectionism. For other impactful voices, see Miguel Abensour, “William Morris: The Politics of Romance,” in Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology, ed. Max Blechman (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1999), 126–61; Miguel Abensour, “Persistent Utopia,” Constellations 15, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 406–21, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2008.00501.x; Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005).16 The Concept of Utopia, Student Edition (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 140–41.17 “Utopia and Violence,” World Affairs 149, no. 1 (1986): 3–9.18 “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 1–16.19 “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered,” in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 131–45.20 Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 30–40.21 See Danielle Celermajer et al., “Justice Through a Multispecies Lens,” Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 3 (September 2020): 475–512, https://doi.org/10/ggvkrv; Danielle Celermajer et al., “Multispecies Justice: Theories, Challenges, and a Research Agenda for Environmental Politics,” Environmental Politics 30, no. 1–2 (2021): 119–40, https://doi.org/10/ghd4fd; Petra Tschakert et al., “Multispecies Justice: Climate-Just Futures with, for and beyond Humans,” WIREs Climate Change 12, no. 2 (2021): e699, https://doi.org/10/ghq9vw. Such conceptual redescriptions are utopian insofar as they subvert anthropocentric approaches to both morality and politics, summoning us to think anew about our species’ place in a world shared with others. See Mathias Thaler, “What If: Multispecies Justice as the Expression of Utopian Desire,” Environmental Politics 31, no. 2 (February 23, 2022): 258–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1899683.22 “Looking for the Blue: The Necessity of Utopia,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 3 (2007): 303, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310701622184.23 More specifically, Levitas distinguishes between three modalities of her utopian method: “The first of these is an analytical, archaeological mode; the second an ontological mode; and the third a constructive, architectural mode.” [Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstruction of Society (Houndmills; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xvii.]24 Failure (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 3–9.25 See Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2002).26 See Donald R. Keough, The Ten Commandments for Business Failure (London: Penguin, 2008).27 See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).28 There are notable similarities here between the findings in engineering and design studies and the debate around care ethics. See Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel, “Make Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care,” in Does America Need More Innovators?, ed. Matthew H. Wisnioski, Eric S. Hintz, and Marie Stettler Kleine, Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation Series (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), 249–69.29 Scott Gabriel Knowles, “Learning from Disaster? The History of Technology and the Future of Disaster Research,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (October 2014): 980, https://doi.org/10/cwvf.30 “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance,” Technology and Culture, 2018, 1–25, https://doi.org/10/cwrx; The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (New York, NY: Currency, 2020).31 The Maintainers, “About,” 2021, https://themaintainers.org/about/.32 This view of the cityscape as “flow” has given rise to a flourishing literature in architecture. See representatively: Nan Ellin, Integral Urbanism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006); Lee Stickels, “Flow Urbanism: The Heterotopia of Flows,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, ed. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), 247–57.33 Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, E-book (London: Penguin, 1995), para. 1.1087.34 Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (May 1, 2007): 5, https://doi.org/10/fvdqbn.35 “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett, Nohow on: Three Novels, 1st ed. (London: John Calder, 1989), 101.36 Giles Slade [Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).] shows that “planned obsolescence” was originally a distinctly American invention, put to profitable use by the car industry.37 Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts – From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers – Came to Be as They Are, E-book (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010), para. 10.3.38 Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), para. 9.12.39 Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011).40 Pestroski has also studied the engineering and design history of various other small and mundane objects, from forks to toothbrushes. See Henry Petroski, Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (New York, NY: Vintage, 2007); Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things.41 Petroski, To Forgive Design, 48–49.42 Ibid., 50.43 Ibid., 74.44 On this point, see Levitas, The Concept of Utopia.45 Paul Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, trans. George H. Taylor (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986).46 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The World Social Forum and the Global Left,” Politics & Society 36, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 247–70, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329208316571.47 Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of Society: On Cultural Politicization (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), 134.48 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Selected Writings, by Karl Marx, ed. David McLellan, 2nd ed. (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), 268–70. On the wider debate, see Steven Lukes, “Marxism and Utopianism,” in Utopias, ed. Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (London: Duckworth, 1984), 153–67.49 For a longer discussion of this aspect, see Mathias Thaler, No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-Changed World (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 91–6. For a useful analysis of the role of imagination in environmental politics, see Marit Hammond, “Imagination and Critique in Environmental Politics,” Environmental Politics 30, no. 1–2 (February 23, 2021): 285–305, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1880062.50 Tim Kreider, “Our Greatest Political Novelist?,” New Yorker, December 12, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/our-greatest-political-novelist.51 Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting, E-book, Science in The Capital Trilogy 3 (New York, NY: Bantham, 2007), para. 58.10–58.11.52 Red Mars, E-book, Mars Trilogy 1 (New York, NY: Bantam Spectra, 1993); Green Mars, E-book, Mars Trilogy 2 (New York, NY: Bantam, 1995); Blue Mars, E-book, Mars Trilogy 3 (New York, NY: Bantam Spectra, 1997).53 Antarctica (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1998).54 This sentiment is summarized in one of Robinson’s early novels: “Must redefine utopia. It isn’t the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.” [Kim Stanley Robinson, Pacific Edge, Three Californias Triptych 3 (New York, NY: Orb, 1995), para. 8.6–8.10.]55 Much of his recent writings can therefore be considered examples of “climate fiction.” See Adeline Johns-Putra, Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162; Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015).56 The Ministry for the Future (New York, NY: Orbit, 2020).57 Forty Signs of Rain, E-book, Science in The Capital Trilogy 1 (New York, NY: Bantham, 2004); Fifty Degrees Below, E-book, Science in The Capital Trilogy 2 (New York, NY: Bantham, 2005); Sixty Days and Counting.58 Robinson himself has theorized the different temporalities of utopian fiction: “Space operas set in the distant future use the whole Universe as a story space, sometimes to spectacular effect. Near-future science fiction is the proleptic realism […]. In between these, say from about one to three centuries from now, there exists a less-populated story zone that I find interesting. You could call it future history. Stories set in this zone resemble nineteenth-century social novels: the characters interact not just with each other, but with their societies and even their planets. Possibly, confronted with the mind-boggling complexity of our present, describing events a century from now allows us to de-strand chosen elements for closer examination.” (Lauren Beukes et al., “Science Fiction When the Future Is Now,” Nature, December 20, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-08674-8.)59 “Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change,” Utopian Studies 27, no. 1 (March 11, 2016): 6.60 Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below, para. 51.83.61 Ibid., para. 14.110.62 Gib Prettyman, “Living Thought: Genes, Genres and Utopia in the Science in the Capital Trilogy,” in Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays, ed. William J. Burling (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2009), 181–203.63 Andrew Rose, “The Unknowable Now: Passionate Science and Transformative Politics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 (July 2016): 260–86, https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.43.2.0260.64 On this point, see Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, E-book (Cambridge; Medford: Polity Press, 2018).65 Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting, para. 27.61.66 The literature on this issue is too vast to be comprehensively cited here. For two prominent accounts, see Sheila Jasanoff, The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future, The Norton Global Ethics Series (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016); Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).67 Benoit Dillet and Sophia Hatzisavvidou, “Beyond Technofix: Thinking with Epimetheus in the Anthropocene,” Contemporary Political Theory 21, no. 3 (September 1, 2022): 351–72, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00521-w.68 As Roger Luckhurst observes regarding Robinson’s endorsement of innovative technologies, “[i]t is ‘our’ contemporary science and technology that has to deal with catastrophic climate change: there are no science-fictional mitigations invented in the course of the 1500 pages; they all sit inside the horizon of current scientific research.” [“The Politics of the Network: The Science in the Capital Trilogy,” in Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays, ed. William Burling (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland Press, 2009), 171.]69 To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2013). The penchant for innovation-speak can perhaps be best illustrated through Bill Gates’ recent contribution to the debate. See Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021).70 On solutionism’s problematic grip on the current discussion around the Anthropocene, see Mike Hulme, “One Earth, Many Futures, No Destination,” One Earth 2, no. 4 (April 24, 2020): 309–11, https://doi.org/10/ggsnnr.71 John Asafu-Adjaye, et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” 2015, http://www.ecomodernism.org/; for an analysis see Jonathan Symons, Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics and the Climate Crisis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).72 Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, E-book (New York, NY: Penguin, 2018), chap. The Environment.73 For a critique of this argument, see Anne Fremaux, “The Return of Nature in the Capitalocene: A Critique of the Ecomodernist Version of the ‘Good Anthropocene,’” in Rethinking the Environment for the Anthropocene: Political Theory and Socionatural Relations in the New Geological Epoch, ed. Manuel Arias-Maldonado and Zev M. Trachtenberg (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019), 19–36; Fremaux and Barry, “The ‘Good Anthropocene’ and Green Political Theory.”74 Daniel Aldana Cohen, “How Will Humanity Endure the Climate Crisis? I Asked an Acclaimed Sci-Fi Writer,” The Guardian, December 9, 2021, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/09/climate-crisis-kim-stanley-robinson. There are several other voices on the left that have tried to recuperate the idea for a “good Anthropocene.” See Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (London; New York, NY: Verso, 2019); Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff (Winchester; Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2015).75 As Robinson remarks in a later novel: “So look, the problem is capitalism. We’ve got the good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. That’s what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws.” [Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (London: Orbit, 2018), 5.]76 For recent contributions to this rich debate, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2021); Ajay Singh Chaudhary, “Sustaining What? Capitalism, Socialism, and Climate Change,” in Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism: Critical Debates, ed. Albena Azmanova and James Chamberlain (Cham: Springer, 2022), 197–239.77 Rebecca M. Evans, “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times, the End of Times?: The Uses and Abuses of Environmental Apocalypse,” ASAP/Journal 3, no. 3 (December 21, 2018): 517, https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2018.0037.78 See, for example: Paul Kingsnorth, “Why I Stopped Believing in Environmentalism and Started the Dark Mountain Project,” The Guardian, April 29, 2010, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/29/environmentalism-dark-mountain-project; Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, E-book (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2015).79 José Luis de Vicente, “Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson,” CCCB LAB (blog), October 31, 2017, http://lab.cccb.org/en/angry-optimism-in-a-drowned-world-a-conversation-with-kim-stanley-robinson/.80 Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, “Whose Odds? The Absence of Climate Justice in American Climate Fiction Novels,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26, no. 4 (November 1, 2019): 944–67, https://doi.org/10/gjbv78.81 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 3.82 Daniel Bodansky, “The Who, What, and Wherefore of Geoengineering Governance,” Climatic Change 121, no. 3 (December 1, 2013): 539–51, https://doi.org/10/f5hmtp; Kevin Elliott, “Geoengineering and the Precautionary Principle,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 24, no. 2 (October 1, 2010): 237–53, https://doi.org/10/fz6vt3.83 Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting, para. 58.11.84 I have also tried to trace the same problem from the other side, so to say, by focusing on the contested views of so-called eco-miserabilists. See Mathias Thaler, “Eco-Miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism,” American Political Science Review (April 18, 2023): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542300031X.Additional informationFundingThis project has benefitted from initial research done under the auspices of an AHRC Networking Grant (AH/X009122/1) as well as a recently finished Leverhulme Research Fellowship (RF-2020-445).