On the necessity of failure

Last week in the van was good, but not as productive as I'd perhaps hoped. I started to flesh out the history of the utopian community on 'The Island', but found it much harder going that I thought I would. As I sat there growing increasingly frustrated it dawned on me that this should come as no great surprise: I haven't attempted to write anything fictional since I was about 13. My schooling had no place for such frivolities- perhaps because imagination might give people the power to realise that the current system is a crock of old shite. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in her essay Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?:

fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

Now I'd like to think I'm not afraid of freedom, but my inexperience of writing fiction (even in the faux-documentary style I've adopted for this project) meant it was all rather hard going. So I'm a little bit nervous about this project, and in a way relieved that I've decided to open it up to the public. I don't feel so responsible now: we can share the blame if it all goes wrong.

And it may well be that it does go wrong. Those who take part in the project may find that they don't like 'The Island' very much; there may be considerable dissensus between those trying to co-construct it. Some may decide they want no part of it. These, of course, are tensions that would play out if we were trying to construct this utopia for real- because all utopias are doomed to failure.

Here's my PhD supervisor Lucy Sargisson talking about the inevitability of failure in utopia:

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try, however. Rather, we should try in the knowledge that we will fail. And that from our failure utopianism will renew itself; hopefully before the failure has completely ossified our society. Fail again. Fail better., as Samuel Beckett might put it. Or we could quote Nietzsche:

All those daring birds that soar far and ever farther into space will somewhere or other be certain to find themselves unable to continue their flight and they will perch on a mast or some narrow ledge- and will be grateful even for this miserable accommodation! Yet who could conclude from this that there was not an endless free space stretching far in front of them and that they had flown as far as they possibly could? In the end however all our great teachers and predecessors have come to a standstill and it is by no means in the noblest or the most graceful attitude that their weariness has brought them to a pause: the same thing will happen to you and me! Yet what does this matter to either of us? Other birds will fly farther!

It is to be hoped that The Island resembles more than a 'miserable perch', but the general lesson is one we must be mindful of: it can only be a utopia so long as it seeks to go beyond itself and so long as it can accommodate those who wish to fly farther. We must be wary of failure, but not let it cripple us and lie paralysed at the feet of neoliberal orthodoxy.

And in this spirit, I am pleased to note this article by John Holloway in Adbusters. This is exactly what 'The Island' seeks to do: not to take power, but to open a utopian space in the present. Whilst it remains a textual utopia only, concrete praxis is being undertaken in a similar vain, and I'm currently incredibly excited about the possibilities opening up with The Free University of Liverpool.

Long may people have the courage to fail.