Gardiner, Michael E. Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism, Peter Lang, Oxford, 2013, 274 pages, £40 paperback, ISBN 9783034307161.

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In this optimistic collection of essays, written over twenty years, Michael E. Gardiner sets out to “rethink the nature and prospects of utopianism” (page 2). In so doing, he provides an engaging re-reading of key writers and traditions able to help us deepen our understanding of utopian social theory and its relationship to the everyday. These two concepts have been conventionally juxtaposed, the one pointing to the transcendent and the other to the banal. Through a polycentric analysis Gardiner explores their multiple encounters. Lefebvre is a pivotal figure here in a discussion that also takes in Levitas, Heller, Fourier, Debord, Bakhtin, and Bloch amongst others, as Gardiner traces a series of dissenting lines through carnival culture, dialectical thought, Messianic Marxism, social totality and capitalist forms of co-option (or recuperation).

Oriented to other scholars’ work rather than his own explicit framing of the utopian, Gardiner’s personal approach comes through in a somewhat mediated manner. But what does emerge clearly is a particular imagining of the utopian: as pluralistic, reflexive, imperfect, and evolving. Gardiner addresses the traditional utopia—a perfect, impossible design or “blue-print” intended to fully satisfy the needs of all—, but the writers he is interested in lack faith in realising the redemptive possibilities of a totalising ideal. So, rather than engaging in arguments about what utopia is, Gardiner focuses on what utopia does.

Of course these two cannot be completely separated. Utopia as representation of a perfect place also does things as writers have described—from inspiring political action to, in Jameson’s words, “prompt[ing] us to mediate on the very limits of our imagination” (page 14).  Gardiner, here, focuses on two tasks utopia performs: enabling a critique of the present, while also uncovering its potential. In relation to the former, Gardiner insistently returns to utopia’s ability to de-familiarise or estrange what is. Iniquities often survive because they are too familiar and habitual to be noticed. Or, to the extent they are noticed, human resignation means no alternative is considered viable. Utopia helps us “see” our world in new, less accepting ways. Utopian fiction is particularly associated with this subversive function. Stories tell of visitors from this world arriving in utopia’s other space or time. As their confusion and questions lead to growing comprehension of the new environment, we follow them in viewing our own, overly accustomed, world in new ways.

Accounts of social spaces, particularly fictional ones, treat utopia as a place. Gardiner, however, also explores a more methodological reading of the utopian. Here, utopia offers a mode of thinking that refuses to remain within the parameters and common-sense of what is. Instead, “with one foot in the ‘possible’ and the other in the ‘impossible’” (page 19), utopian methods reach “forward”. For the most part, this doesn’t leave the present behind, as “what could be” is found contained in “what is”. This is evident in everyday utopianism, which Gardiner suggests “has much of value to tell us about… [the] relatively unknown qualities and untapped potentials” of daily life (page 37). Later, gesturing to critiques of de-familiarisation and the drive to shed light on the taken-for-granted, Gardiner explores the claim that everyday life’s value inheres in its capacity to obscure, to maintain opaqueness in the face of a technocratic ocular-centrism (page 199).

Whether utopia nestles within the everyday as critical looking glass or as an alternative, or is in fact forged out of the everyday’s unknowable, intangible, ineffable qualities, a key challenge for utopian and radical scholars is how to conceptualise the relationship between the present and its sought-after future: between what is and what could be. Weak Messianism reveals a terminological multitude as writers try to capture this relationship: as seeds, traces, embryos, shoots, signs, moments, glimpses, anti-disciplines, clandestine spaces, promises “buried deep”, unofficial practices, and the extraordinary within the ordinary. Yet, if organic models are not to be relied upon with their biological patterning of change, how does potential become this other much preferred world? Does it explode from the “now”, rupturing the normal order in unpredictable ways? Is it nurtured and built? Gardiner approaches this relationship in several ways, from the practical engagements of situationism and surrealism, to academic ploys and methods. Like many utopian scholars, Gardiner also draws on Ernst Bloch’s distinction between abstract and concrete utopias. While the former are not rejected completely, as day dreams, thought experiments and wishful thinking, they are seen to deflect or compensate, helping people to accept the unsatisfactory world in which they dwell. Concrete utopias, by contrast, provide “‘real’… possibilities that are immanently present in the here-and-now” (page 4). Rooted in the material conditions of the present, concrete utopias offer viable possibilities for significant change.

Gardiner does not address in any detail practices of concrete utopia (although he does allude to related utopian projects, such as Wright and his collaborators’ “real utopias”). Some sense of a change ethos, as well as notion of the good society, however, comes through in Gardiner’s emphasis on utopia’s plural quality. Such plurality includes different imaginings of change and of what the good society would be like. But the good society is also seen as one that embraces plurality and difference, without any “ultimate reconciliation” (page 169). Gardiner explores different kinds of difference, from varied life-styles, as people create chosen life paths, to “active and ongoing struggle” to produce meaningful forms of difference (page 239). Thus, difference here includes those “minimal” forms that can be co-opted or incorporated by capitalism and bureaucracy, as well as differences that resist the status quo, and which need with effort to be forged. This last is an important aspect of a radical or utopian ontology. Emphasised by Levitas in relation to desire, Gardiner also notes the importance of approaching difference as relational and contingent—anchored in changing social formations that they, in turn, work to shape.

The relationship between “difference” as it is now, and as it might be, however, poses a major challenge that the book leaves hanging: to what extent should a pluralistic utopian politics seek institutional hegemony? And what kinds of response should it make to reactionary forms of difference? How should the projected formation of new interests and desires respond to those deeply felt attachments that currently exist (particularly if notions of false consciousness are disavowed)? These questions, hugely important for a transformative politics, cannot be addressed abstractly, isolated from the specific contexts in which they arise. In that light, it’s a shame Gardiner does not discuss the empirical work of scholars such as Lucy Sargisson who powerfully explore the challenges utopian communities confront in seeking to create new norms, wants and practices. Focusing, by contrast, on Heller and Fehér, pluralism’s negotiations remain too abstract to confront the actual complexity that existing differences, including (minority) reactionary ones, generate.

Part of the difficulty arises because institutions and the state remain, for the most part, outside of Gardiner’s account. Thus, questions of difference focus largely on the right of individuals (or groups) to pursue their own interests and desires (or hold divergent views) providing they don’t harm, exploit or dominate others. But what does this mean for governance bodies that explicitly aim to impact on others, whose actions purposively prefer some ways of living over others, and whose choices invariably exclude, marginalise or advantage?

While the everyday tends to be interpreted as a life outside the institutional state (as does utopia), much can be gained from thinking about everyday state practices, as well as more utopian state forms. The political dimension of a democratic state emerges briefly in Gardiner’s discussion of Heller’s “rational utopia”, with its focus on domination-free communication, rational adjudication of needs, and the full development of people’s abilities. Centred is tolerant rational dialogue, where participants are open to the possibility of abandoning or at least changing their point of view. Yet, the limits to this dialogic model, which assumes orthodox believers of liberal rationality, conservative Christianity, and radical socialism can agree on the “norms and rules of justice” (page 191), and be open to each other’s perspectives, seem all too apparent.

Gardiner does explore other approaches to speech, signalling its expressive, metaphorical, homely, inventive and ambiguous (or multivalent) qualities. It would have been interesting to see a staged encounter between these perspectives and Heller and Fehér’s more Habermasian approach. Doing so may have opened up other ways of thinking about what language can bring to struggles around difference. But what struggles over difference also reveal is the value of modes of engagement that decentre speech.

Gardiner discusses festive, playful, sensuous knowledge and bodily contact, practices that may involve speech, but do not rely on it. Bracketing verbal disagreement and the drive for common ground, these other kinds of sensory contact may do the political work, of connection and solidarity, in contexts where instrumental speech cannot. Gardiner explores the everyday power of such sensual forms, even as he also explores their recuperation by capitalism. However, considering sensory contact within the far less addressed context of state and political action (all too often seen as coterminous with speech) might highlight something that utopian studies—with its openness towards the ineffable—can contribute to progressive political thinking. Gill Valentine (2008) has recently introduced a note of caution in relation to current tendencies to romanticise embodied contact between strangers. Yet one challenge is how to access the political accomplishments of sensory forms of contact—between strangers or difference—in ways that don’t depend on their “capture” in linguistic modes of assessment or calibration.

Michael Gardiner’s careful reading of different works offers an important engagement with these issues. Although, in places, I would have liked more sense of the stakes—why it matters whether we interpret a text in this way rather than that—, Gardiner provides a remarkably lucid account of lengthy, often difficult texts, attuned consistently to their value for a transformative left politics. In so doing, he traces a mid-way path between the polarities that plague much radical work as academics place their chips on one side or the other: creativity or habits, ideology or utopia, the present or the future, randomness or determination, the real or the ideal. Consistently eschewing unhelpful binaries, Gardiner draws on dialectical and post-dialectical scholarship, to focus on their dynamic, but not determined, interrelationship. The analysis that emerges has a subtle, generous flavour, offering many directions through which new twenty-first century progressive thinking on post-industrial liberal democracies can take shape. 

References

Valentine G (2008) Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter. Progress in Human Geography 32: 323-337.