Wednesday 19 January 2011

A New Blog for the Project

The Bookmobile is dead! Long live the Bookmobile! I certainly enjoyed my time in the 'downright pop wagon', and I hope it entertained others as much.

Of course, it may be resurrected one day, in one form or another. But the project that I began as its writer-in-residence will certainly live on, and I've made a website for it right here. YH485 are continuing to support it and I'd love it if you took the time to have a peruse and perhaps get involved.

Until then, thanks for your interest!

Saturday 11 December 2010

A Pop Wagon in the Japanese Press!


Big thanks to Jeffery Baker, who alerted us to this brilliant article about Sideshow, as featured in the Japanese Press this month!

http://www.japandesign.ne.jp/HTM/REPORT/england_y/04/

Here's an auto-translation of the section that covers The Bookmobile:

After finishing out of the building and look at book fairs, found a downright pop wagon! YH485 Press independent publisher of Bukkumobairupurojekuto. This car is the role of the mobile library, SIDESHOW is being haunted by the main exhibition hall. They intended to share information and knowledge about art, many of which are collected by SIDESHOW is provided by the participating artists.Were tightly packed with men in the vehicle floor to ceiling books is "Utopia (Utopia)," In studying, told me that participating in this project as a writer.

Monday 6 December 2010

Reflections on Bookmobiling

Thanks to all those who came down on Saturday night. I had a lovely time, and really enjoyed chatting to so many people about the project to collaboratively write a utopia set on the abandoned stretch of wasteland between Sneinton and Nottingham railway station (now officially the subject of a bid for planning permission for a Tesco). There definitely seems to be a groundswell of momentum for it at the moment. I'll return to blog about it again shortly, and start posting it as I write it. But where do I post it?...

...I sent an email to Jonathan, Aaron and Harriet from YH485 earlier to see whether they felt the blog should continue to host discussion of the Island utopia project, or whether it should perhaps move to a new home. It's something I'd like to run indefinitely, whilst the Bookmobile had a very definite time-frame. I'm a bit worried that someone coming to the project in 3 months, 6 months or 2 years might be utterly confused by the mention of the Bookmobile. I'm also wary of the project sort of subsuming the Bookmobile Project; although there's a clear relation between them, they're not one and the same and the Bookmobile did so much more than give me the space to start this project.

Thinking about this has made me reflect on Emma Cocker's talk on the nature of the invitation (the first of the talks commissioned by YH485 to co-incide with the Bookmobile). I was invited by YH485 to be their writer in residence, but did I understand their invitation properly? Have I outstayed my welcome by creating some monstrous project that will never be finished? Should I have tried to keep the timeframe of the project? Should I have written about books? But if I did misconstrue the invitation, whose fault is this? Mine? Or YH485's? Perhaps the invitation wasn't clear enough. And does it matter? Or has my misconstrual been productive? Are they glad I didn't do what they wanted me to do? Have I been forgiven now that I'm reflecting on all this in reference to a talk they themselves put on?

Whatever the case, I'd like to say how glad I am that I was invited; how glad I am that I've had the space to start this project; how glad I am that £120 of public funding can somehow trickle down to an anarchistic utopian to embark on a project seeking to challenge capitalism and the state; and how glad I am to have met so many fascinating people whilst doing it. And it's only just beginning...


Friday 3 December 2010

Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging Other's Books (and arranging space!)

The final Bookmobile event for Sideshow is tomorrow night in the Sideshow Cafe at One Thoresby Street. There'll be readings, film screenings, discussions about utopia(nism) and a chance for the audience to help collectively construct the utopia I'm writing as part of this project. It'll be an almighty celebration of the power of reading and the power of collectives; and we'd love to see you there!



Saturday 27 November 2010

The Scream of Nomadic Utopianism

The cold weather defeated the Bookmobile's aged engine today, so I spent a good few hours in the study at Nottingham Contemporary instead. They have an excellent collection of books and it's a space I've promised myself I'll make more use of over the next few months.



While there I was flicking through Utopias from the Whitechapel Gallery's 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series (which I highly recommend) and came across an extract from Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, a text I rather struggled my way through when I first embarked on my PhD in utopianism. It piqued my interest, though, because it engages with an issue I've been grappling with in my thesis recently- and which is of relevance to the utopia I'm writing for the Bookmobile Project. Here's the quote that drew me in...

[I]t is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they offered visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation...Indeed, the attempt to establish positive criteria of the desirable society characterizes liberal political theory from Locke to Rawls, rather than the diagnostic interventions of the Utopians, which, like those of the great revolutionaries, always aim at the alleviation and elimination of the sources of exploitation and suffering, rather than at the composition of blueprints for bourgeois comfort. The confusion arises from the formal properties of these texts, which also seem to offer blueprints: these are however maps and plans to be read negatively, as what is to be accomplished after the demolitions and the removals, and in the absence of all those lesser evils the liberals believed to be inherent in human nature.

It seems a little counter-intuitive at first. Utopias are negative? Surely the whole point of a utopia is to offer a positive vision of what is to be done; to provide a riposte to those who say "you're always moaning, but how would your world look?"? In a sense, that was my motivation in writing a utopia ('The Island') for this project: I think that this country is being governed in an increasingly hierarchical manner- but I don't think that the Labour Party or the institutional left has any real answers. Rather than just moan about this state of affairs I want to try and create a space (albeit a fictional one) that might have some suggestions; might distribute political power in a nonhierarchical manner. But in hoping that people approach my utopia with positivity- in asking them to believe in it- am I falling into a liberal trap?


I'd like to think I'm not, but I also think I know the point that Jameson is trying to make.


I certainly don't want to offer The Island as the be all and end all of political development: it may well be a place of co-operation, happiness and fulfillment, but it will also be a space of upheaval, sorrow, pain and suffering*. I don't want it to be read as a 'blueprint' that can be followed to bring about 'the good life'. It is a space of suggestions, not a space of answers. Suggestions will always bring forth new questions. They will not be adequate forever.


* * * *


I believe in what I call 'nomadic utopianism', which rejects transcendent schema in favour of prefigurative, immanent modes of becoming and which believes that a utopia is a society constantly being remade by those who inhabit it, rather than a static state of perfection. The nomadic utopia is not based on eternal principles ('justice', 'fairness', etc); but on fleeing from a hierarchical present. It draws its power from what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would call 'lines-of flight'.



Nomadic utopianism, then, is negative. It is a fleeing from hierarchy, not a move to a pre-determined utopia (such a philosophy I call State Utopianism, but that is for another time). It is in fleeing that nomadic utopianism creates something positive; shapes its utopia. This utopia may, however, see the return of hierarchy, and so the negative utopianism must never be allowed to dissipate into positive celebrations.


However noble our aims, whenever we put the flag in the ground and say 'here we are, this is the site of victory- this is our utopia' (as [neo]liberals have done) we betray that utopia and condemn it to hierarchy and dystopia.


Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed details this powerfully, I think, and I am also fond of Tom Moylan's message to those living in a the 'utopian' society of Whileaway in the Joanna Russ story of the same name. He tells them to

be historically vigilant...do not lock in the utopian achievement, do not remove the social utopia from the processes of time. Don’t cut a deal with the false utopian devil of your own collective imagination as it dreams of the end of history; and don’t cover up the deal by changing the colony from that of a place-in-process to one of eternal delight, literally allowing time to while away…[do] not…let the process of learning and change end, [do] not…risk a situation- brought about by either internal or external forces- that might “take away the meaning” of life.

* * * *


This is all a little confusing, though. A negativity that creates something positive? That doesn't seem to make much sense. It is perfectly possible to do clever things with the meaning of words and reference Adorno's negative dialectics here- but I think a more useful concept comes from the work of John Holloway. Inspired by the Zapatistas (whose claim that 'we make the road by walking' is a fine example of nomadic utopianism), he writes of social change coming from calls 'the scream'.



The scream, he notes, begins as a scream of negativity, of dissonance, of intensely felt pain at the horrors of the current order. It is a response that is felt physically and emotionally as much (and perhaps more than) it is thought. It is the scream that traces lines of flight, the scream that is utopianism. And just as Bakunin wrote that 'the urge to destroy is also a creative urge', this scream resonates as it is articulated begins to create a utopia. As Holloway writes, the scream is 'a refusal to be contained, an overflowing, a going beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of polite society'.


* * * *


Utopia must keep screaming. It must always fill itself to the brim with a utopianism that seeks to go further. It must always go beyond. I hope that I can capture some of this urgency in 'The Island', and by opening it to the public to engage in, I hope the text will remain open and evolving forever (more of this soon): always failing, always screaming, always trying to go beyond...


*I don't want to fall into the trap of saying 'because these are what make us human', but I think that they are sometimes inevitable consequences of freedom (a lesson that all the great dystopias teach us. And the story of man's fall from Paradise, for that matter).

Monday 22 November 2010

There's a crack in everything: that's where the light gets in...

Given that the utopia I'm writing for The Bookmobile Project focuses on resistance and alternatives to neoliberalism emerging in those spaces where neoliberalism has most obviously failed, it's interesting to see this article on the emerging arts scene in Dublin in today's Guardian. Similar things have been happening in Nottingham for a while, I think. One Thoresby Street would not be in existence if capitalism could find a more profitable use for it, for one!

The problem is that rather than providing an alternative to the current way of living, such grassroots activity can be co-opted for the aims of capital, and art has often been used as a tool of gentrification. I don't think we can allow this fear to paralyse us, but it's certainly not something we can easily dismiss. If these cracks let the light in, we have to make sure it's a light that shines from a better future...

Friday 19 November 2010

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.