Provisional utopian imaginations empower disability activists. Past failures can and should inspire future success.

To understand more fully how activists might productively engage with and respond to failure, I turn to the role of failure in utopian political thought and action. Utopia has traditionally been conceived as a literary and philosophical tradition dedicated to developing a blueprint of a perfect society. In the last century, critical theorists, from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, and poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault have helped rethink utopianism as part of an effort to problematize Enlightenment faith in progress (van der Walt 2014). Ernst Bloch in particular has become known for his broader understanding of utopia which includes a wide array of “dreams of a better life”, expressed in anything from architecture to music. Utopias provide less of a universal blueprint than an “expression of hope” that acts as a “directing act of a cognitive kind” (Bloch 1995, 1, 12). His heirs have articulated two key elements to this conception of utopia that are crucial for thinking about the failure of the ADA and transformative law: its ambiguity and provisionality.

Utopias are ambiguous because they constitute partial, limited attempts to imagine a better world which are formulated using the language and frameworks of the present. Utopias simultaneously present a moment of radical disjuncture to think and act freely using our imagination, but also “force us to face the fact that we do not live there; we live here, and we cannot but use the language of the here and now in all our imaginings” (Winter 2006, 3). The question then is how to respond to this ambiguity: do we presuppose that we have the means to identify our vision of the world as the only correct one and to resolve all problems that come with implementing this vision in its “true” form, or do we affirm the limitations of our ability to imagine the not-yet.

To affirm the limits to our utopian impulse is to embrace provisionality. Provisionality does not imply imprecision, vagueness, or the refusal to take a position on the challenges of our time (Levitas 2007, 303). Instead, it is about leaving behind the desire to envision and implement a perfect society, in favour of imagining a better society that is characterized by change, difference, and open to criticism. The complexity of reality demands that utopian actors and thinkers articulate concrete ideas about moving beyond the status quo that remains open to revision as society changes and their implications become clearer. Furthermore, it means that we cannot rely on a set framework that guides us as to when, and to what degree, to hold onto our utopian convictions and visions and when to adapt them. Instead, we must constantly renegotiate the difficult balancing act between acknowledging the boundaries of the present and seeking to transcend them towards the hoped-for future.

Awareness of the ambiguous and provisional character of utopia enables activists to face up to the fact that some form of failure is inevitable as the utopian vision fails to materialize in and transcend the present. This is important because fear of inevitable failure has in the past encouraged utopian thinkers and actors to pursue totalitarian or violent means to overcome the limits reality puts on their ambitions. The acknowledgement of inevitable failure also allows activists to challenge another problematic reaction, which arises from the gap between the present and the hoped-for future: the argument that failure is a sign that “utopian” demands and endeavours are unrealistic and must be moderated by taking a more realist(ic) approach (Thaler 2019, 1012). Once activists accept that their projects are ambiguous and provisional, inevitable failure can instead become a source of playful experimentation—“a site of beginnings that exceed themselves in unrealized ways, where inspiration for alternative political worlds might be derived” (Gabay 2022, 288).

Engagement with inevitable failure comes with a twofold danger of succumbing to unquestioning hope and resigned fatalism. First, acceptance of the inevitability of failure can encourage activists to ignore the concrete failings of their utopian endeavours, because failure was programmed in anyway. Second, treating failure as inevitable can lead to overly pessimistic worldviews and to avoiding any projects or goals that seem more prone to failure than others. But affirmation of provisionality and ambiguity also provides the tools for a discussion about whether a particular instance of failure was inevitable or could and should have been avoided. For such a discussion to succeed, it must try to distinguish between inevitable and concrete failure and ask in relation to concrete instances of failure, to what extent they were inevitable and therefore something to be acknowledged and even embraced. While all failure is a consequence of the fact that we cannot escape the imperfection of the present, and although the boundaries between types of failure are fluid, their sources differ in important ways. Inevitable failure is largely an expression of our inability to imagine the not-yet, while concrete failings are a consequence of insufficient attentiveness to the present conditions and the potential and limitations of a chosen strategy to move from the present to the future. The former should encourage a playful revision of our imaginings, the latter should drive activists to improve the tools and strategies deployed in envisioning and enacting a better world.