Performative Utopias: Making Space, Taking Time, Doing Differently?

Abstract

In an increasingly dystopian world, the notion of ‘utopia’ might seem all but obliterated, yet at the same time, it has become a productive concept for social theory and cultural practice. Joining many utopian revivalists who have addressed utopias as real, critical, minor, or sustainable, this essay makes the case that utopia could also be fruit-fully understood as a matter of performance, or ‘doing differently’—not in the sense of representing let alone feigning, that is, but as bringing something into being. Noting a shared suspicion over both ideas (“only performative,” “just a utopia”), the essay’s two central sections ask how each concept could shed light on the other’s perceived blind spots. Defining performativity as a ‘doing of things,’ first, the very opposition of utopia and reality opens out toward a dramaturgy of real-world utopias at different stages of their performance: people ‘do’ something, and it begins to look like some ‘thing.’ Based on definitions of utopia as a ‘no-place’ that is ‘not-yet,’ second, the ‘realities’ that make it impossible are identified with all those routines that actively take the time, space, and energy from doing anything more aspirational. Hence performative utopias are located in oppositional practices that begin with simply taking the time and making the space.