Researching utopias: from aspiration as a moral obligation to embodied utopias

I have been exploring alternative agricultures in Morocco and Switzerland through ethnographic research methods. Despite working explicitly on quiet alternativity – concrete agro­ecological and everyday practices with potentially ben­eficial socio-ecological outcomes, which are however not promoted, experienced or described as ‘alternative’ or ‘dis­ruptive’ by the people who practise them – I realised that I often felt surprised when farmers could or would not really answer my questions about their aspirations and their opinion on how food should be ideally grown in their places in the future. Neither in Switzerland nor in Morocco did these questions provoke extensive answers nor even interest in the way I had hoped. Facing this lack of enthusiasm to answer this type of question, I started to reconsider utopiaas an embodied and embedded experience, where the mind-body duality collapses, to broaden what utopia can mean beyond purely speculative thinking.

Le Corbusier once said: “Man walks straight because he has a goal: he knows where he is going, he has decided to go somewhere and he walks straight there”. This emblematically expresses the idea inherent in ‘modernity’ that there is a linear path of ‘progress’ leading to an End of History. Modernity’s end of history utopia relies on the widely accepted moral assumptions that ‘being human’ means the capacity to look forward instead of living day by day. Yet, this seems increasingly disconnected from a vast majority of people’s daily experiences in which the future seems uncertain. Hence, my initial surprise that many farmers rarely expressed any aspirations of how the world should ideally look was probably tainted by a certain moral obligation to have a clearly articulated image projected to the future. This meant not only ignoring the privilege of some to plan ahead, while others are busy finding strategies to cope with daily life but also that hope can express itself as a feeling manifested ‘quietly’ in bodily practices and ways of being. Seeing the mind and body as inseparable, feeling that the world is wrong becomes a lived and embodied experience. Ernst Bloch in his seminal work Principle of Hope defines hope as an Agens driving us forward, which does not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to put in place for the world which feels wrong nor that it can easily be translated into a coherent discourse and vision.

Trying to “look around rather than ahead” (Tsing 2015:22), I started to investigate quiet expressions of hope, namely, to explore utopia not just as something that is thought and said but as something that is embodied in a specific experience and embedded in a specific place in the world. This implied recognizing supposedly mundane practices and experiences as powerful sites of transformation, sustainability, and political action without dismissing them as secondary to ‘real material’ struggles and aspirations of ‘progress’. Embodied experiences of utopias in one form or another kept coming up in my research. Yet, it took me a while to recognise those as such. Much like ‘disgruntled political economists’ (Carolan 2016) seduced by the elegance of certain abstractions, I was trained to see an ocean of sameness: capitalist relations at work resulting in environmental destruction and social inequality. I felt less equipped to ‘read for difference’, as the feminist geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham put it, in order to open up spaces for aspirations of change. Hence, while I felt that many stories farmers told me were important to the people who shared them with me, I was first hesitant to theorise those positive experiences, as I have rather been trained to focus on ‘negative’ pressures which dismiss such moments as secondary tothe real material struggles people are facing. Yet, I increasingly felt that they are not, that dismissing such stories reduces the multifaceted life experiences of the farmers I encountered, and thereby fails to explain why they engage in alternative agricultures. Here is one of these stories:

At an event called “A taste of tomorrow’s agriculture” on a farm in Switzerland, a farmer told the public that two years before his retirement, he changed from conventional to organic farming. He said he had started again to walk through his fields instead of only driving through them on his tractor, thereby observing the insects and studying the weed growing on different patches on the soil to understand the material characteristics of his soil and accordingly the different “needs” and possibilities of each patch. All of which, made farming for him suddenly more interesting and satisfying. He later explained to me: “economically speaking this was an absolute non-sense. But one day, I was sitting on my tractor, I had almost finished applying an herbicide when I suddenly realised that this made no sense. I just knew that I would not continue.”

With this and other stories farmers told me, I slowly came to understand embodied utopia in terms of enchantment, an experience which can feel like “a transitory sensuous condition dense and intense enough to stop you in your tracks and toss you onto new terrain, to move you from the actual world to its virtual possibilities” (Bennett, 2011:11). Enchantment, an experience of wonder which gives life its meaning (Curry, 2019) is a relationship between two sub­jects – where the other subject can be almost anyone or any­thing: the first barley germs sprouting after a hot and dry summer, the silence in the morning, the liveliness of a little patch of soil, or the cuddling of a goat. From this understanding of enchantment, it is only a little step to mystical theorisations of utopia. Corbin (1976) explains that while the term Na-Koja-Abad, coined by Sohravardi, a Persian philosopher and mystic, etymologically and literally means no-where-land, it is fundamentally different in its meaning from the term (O)u-Topia coined in 1516 by Thomas More which in essence means no-place, and which quickly came to be used to refer to a non-existent good place in many languages. Even though both terms refer to a situs that does not exist in a physical place and is discernible by sensory organs, Na-Koja-Abad, unlike (O)u-topia, designs a site that is discernible by suprasensory organs. El Wardany, an Egyptian novelist, nicely and effectively puts it:

It is not a place you can inquire about by asking ‘Where?’. It is the nowhere that surrounds us everywhere, whose chasm can yawn open at any moment, whose winds may sweep suddenly through the present. […] it is more than just a Sufi limbo, pure and removed from our profane world, or an alternative one to which we might escape, but signifies instead a place on earth, somewhere where the ‘No’ can go to work, forcing fractures in the status quo.

El Wardany’s idea of the ‘No who can go to work’ relates to the disruptive force of enchantment. Enchantment, an embodied utopia, cannot be instrumentalised, but it can create openings to see the world a bit differently, and thereby lead to another way of being in the world.

Consequently, researching utopias not just in terms of speculative thinking and loud alternativity – practices and ways of life promoted as alternative by those who live them – but also in terms of embodiment, allowed me to get closer to the Agens which leads farmers to engage with alternative agricultures. I found that hope is more often a feeling manifested ‘quietly’ in daily practices and ways of being than in ‘loud’ speech and political agendas. People change practices and spaces in ways that are often overlooked – especially when we try to capture trans­formation through overly rigid concepts that do not travel easily across different contexts. Hence, theorising embodied utopias builds on the insights of the potentially ‘quiet’ nature of socio-ecologically beneficial practices and invites us to stretch our imaginations to detect the traces and contours of not-yet-articulated common agendas. In my research, this meant recognizing these ‘quiet’ and ‘loud’ experiences already there and their underlying motivations as a first step to imagining and enacting more broadly ecologically sound and just agri-cultures. Beyond my research, I propose embodied utopias as a proposition of transversality to explore the inner worlds shaping people’s actions. Contrary to utopias as speculative thinking, embodied utopias are transcendental experiences where the body-mind duality collapses and while they do not necessarily translate into a concrete image of utopia, they can still push you into new realms, leading you to object dominant ways of subjectivation.