2---Feasibility is conceptual blackmail. Failure is a feature, not a bug for utopic praxis.

Scholars of utopianism in IR seek to avoid narrow, or ideologically ‘correct’ 8 analyses of revolutionary conditions through foregrounding process and means over ends. However, they nonetheless create a conceptual blackmail, whereby a project of radical political transformation can only be considered properly political if it is realistic, where what is realistic becomes an asocial and ontological boundary between the political and the anti-political. As such, failed utopian projects are only so because they are not realistic, and if they are not realistic they therefore sit beyond politics, and outside of the purview of an IR Theory constructed to analyse, respond to and/or transform world political phenomena. This results in a myopia towards forms of utopian praxis considered ‘unrealistic’, and ignores the ways that political failure exceeds itself. This risks making historical and contemporary manifestations of kairotic utopianism fall outside of the purview of disciplinary IR. As a way of building on the means-focussed approach to utopianism in IR but moving beyond this conceptual blackmail and myopia, I will suggest that an overlooked and idiosyncratic anarchist tradition of prefigurative ‘no-point’ utopic praxis can help to reinterpret utopian ‘failure’ as a politically productive and unfinished site for thinking about radical transformation in IR, and act as an already existing normative basis for a politics of radical social and political transformation.

The paper does not directly address the ways in which utopianism has been put to work in IR theory more generally.9 Rather, it examines the literature that has sought to explicitly promote a certain way of understanding utopianism in IR. Some of this literature has made important contributions to the ways in which we think about revolutions and utopianism in disciplinary IR. In responding to and rejecting the ends-focussed modalities of 20th century authoritarian statism, it has impelled a focus on the relationship between specific historical conditions and utopian politics, the immanent possibilities of particular socio-political conditions, and the importance of means over ends.10 Indeed, this intersection between antiauthoritarianism and immanence maps on to the more explicitly anarchist sensibilities that inform some of the subsequent arguments in this paper, but that move us beyond the limitations of the chronos/kairos dichotomy noted above. This dichotomy has produced a narrow analysis of political ontology that evaluates radical politics according to feasibility and a dialectical relationship with existing institutional structures. The ‘realism’ these scholars adopt, although sometimes defined and applied in different ways,11 and emerging from different intellectual foci,12 is a perspective nonetheless relatively consistently rooted in ‘what is immanent within history…grounded in “actually existing” conditions’, 13 involving ‘a process which is limited, long term and humble’, 14 ‘benign and reformist steps’, practicality and process, ‘calculated to make a better world somewhat more probable’. 15 Furthermore, what is deemed to be ‘realistic’ is rooted in a world-view informed by and against 20th century authoritarian statism.16

This is important because the scholarship on utopianism and IR theory deals very directly with the question of what IR is for, and what it can reasonably do. Issues of political ontology are thus central, albeit sometimes implicitly so, to this scholarship. Subsequent sections will suggest that this ontology revolves around a dichotomy between, on the one hand, properly political interventions that are as such because they are embedded in ‘real’ conditions that take place in an identifiable and singularly imagined chronology, and on the other hand, anti-political interventions that are as such because they are deemed to take place divorced from ‘real’ conditions, in the world of ‘dreaming’, 17 and are thus prone to failure, a salutary lesson in how not to transform real-world conditions. If ‘the search for the pure, perfect good place must fail’, 18 then it is striking that the relevant IR literature on utopianism has not seriously interrogated what becomes regarded as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘failed’, and why it is labelled as such more closely.19 Critically engaging with this ontology (and its exception; kairotic failure) is important for IR scholarship, because in establishing a ‘realistic’ account of utopianism for IR, the conceptual blackmail noted above is created. This places much of the literature on utopianism in a narrowly chronotic register, which means that it can only treat failure as such, and as a finished historical lesson for how not to conduct revolutionary politics, rather than a site of beginnings that exceed themselves in unrealised ways, where inspiration for alternative political worlds might be derived.

The paper is structured as follows: the first section elaborates on the arguments presented thus far, mapping out the aforementioned chronos/kairos dichotomy and ontology via an exploration of key scholars of the utopian tradition in IR theory, including a close focus on E.H. Carr, who stands as an explicit and key point of reference for many scholars of utopianism in in the discipline. Mapping this dichotomy out will reveal its limitations, namely that IR scholarship on utopianism, in understandably rejecting the prominent kairotic and authoritarian tendencies of some 20th century utopian projects, risks assigning all forms of kairos to the violence of that period. In so doing, this scholarship misses important lessons for revolutionary politics that can be derived from a broader reading of kairos that can help us reconceptualise ‘failure’.

In light of this limited approach that assigns kairos as failure, the paper then situates itself within broader scholarship on utopianism20 and radical anarchist and socialist figures peripheral to IR (where Anarchism itself represents a peripheral tradition within IR21). These figures include the mystical anarcho-socialist and German revolutionary Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), who was murdered during the 1918/19 German Revolution, as well as his friend and contemporary, the philosopher Ernst Bloch. Speaking back to both 20th century authoritarianism and the chronotic ‘realistic’ ontologies of utopian realism in IR, the paper foregrounds a form of prefigurative ‘no-point’ utopianism in order to collapse this conceptually limiting kairos/chronos dichotomy and ontology. Once kairos and chronos are understood to be mutually constitutive, this will subsequently allow for an interpretation of ‘failure’ that understands it as in excess of itself. In plural chronological registers that do not necessarily cleave only to 20th century kairotic totalitarianism, failure will not be treated as an ending, but be reconceptualised as a period of revolutionary struggle pregnant with every conceivable form of kairotic rupture, and thus as a productive site for the retrieval of transformative utopic praxis in the study and practice of radical challenges to established orders in international politics.