{"id":9396,"date":"2023-02-17T20:12:04","date_gmt":"2023-02-18T01:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/?p=9396"},"modified":"2023-02-22T13:32:35","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T18:32:35","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-getting-more-concrete-three-questions-for-gary-wilder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/utopia1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-getting-more-concrete-three-questions-for-gary-wilder\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Getting More Concrete: Three Questions on Concrete Utopianism"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/h2>\n
\n

Like prison abolition, reparations for slavery, and public debt cancellation movements, these initiatives [the Black Lives Matter movement and Occupy Wall Street] link a concrete demand to a holistic vision of a fundamentally different way of being (together).<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014 Gary Wilder, Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity<\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

In Concrete Utopianism: The Politics of Temporality and Solidarity<\/em>, published by Fordham University Press in 2022, Gary Wilder advocates for a turn away from certain strands of contemporary critical thought (such as negative dialectics, Afropessimism, and cultural strands of postcolonial thought), and for a (re)turn to more constructive forms of critical political engagement. Wilder, one of the leading critics and historians of Francophone Black Atlantic social thought, author of Freedom<\/em> Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World<\/em> (Duke University Press, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars<\/em> (University of Chicago Press, 2005), draws in part on those traditions (\u00c9douard Glissant perhaps most) to counterpose to contemporary critical skeptics a path towards a more positive and engaged political stance. Wilder\u2019s intervention consists of both a negative slope (the critique of certain strands of contemporary critical thought) and a positive side (developing concrete utopianism with a central element of internationalism). His positive utopian vision might be called, using his term, \u201ca possible-impossible internationalism.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

With regard to the positive side of the project, Wilder\u2019s book forms part of a contemporary rebirth of new forms of utopianism, variously called \u201cconcrete utopias\u201d (by \u00c9tienne Balibar in his \u201cUncovering Lines of Escape<\/a>,\u201d Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope<\/em>, and our 13\/13 public seminar on \u201c13 Concrete Utopias\/13 Seminars at Columbia,\u201d at least as articulated in the problem statement<\/a>, introduction<\/a>, and other posts<\/a>), or \u201creal utopias\u201d (as in Erik Olin Wright\u2019s book Envisioning Real Utopias<\/em><\/a> (2010)), or \u201cpractical utopias\u201d (as in Noam Chomsky<\/a>\u2019s preface and Michael Albert\u2019s book\u00a0Practical Utopias<\/i>),\u00a0or in terms of the French term “utopier<\/i>” (as\u00a0La\u00ebtitia Riss will suggest<\/a>\u00a0at Utopia 11\/13 in Paris).\u00a0The exact term has implications, but the overarching thrust of all this work is to revive, within critical theory (writ large), the turn to praxis\u2014to move critical theory from \u201ccrisis and critique\u201d to \u201ccritique and praxis.\u201d The fundamental intuition underlying the move is that we live in a different world today, one of deep interdependence caused by global crises, and that this calls for forward-looking critical praxis.<\/p>\n

Along these lines, Wilder calls for concrete utopianism hand-in-hand with critical internationalism, or, in his words, \u201ca mass popular coalition of racialized, poor, precarious working people, along with other alienated and disenfranchised citizens, to come together in a movement for societal transformation and popular democracy.\u201d[2]<\/a> Concretely, Wilder turns to concrete utopias in the final chapter of his book, \u201cThe World We Wish to See,\u201d where he mentions Angela Davis and the prison abolition movement[3]<\/a>, the movement for Black lives[4]<\/a>, Occupy Wall Street[5]<\/a>, the debt cancellation movement[6]<\/a>, the Green New Deal[7]<\/a>, the Standing Rock protest[8]<\/a>, among other contemporary mobilizations and struggles.<\/p>\n

With regard to the negative slope of the book\u2014the critique of what he calls Left realism, Left culturalism, Left presentism\u2014Wilder offers a deep engagement and countervision to certain genres of contemporary critical thought that, he feels, effectively give up on trying to change the world. Wilder targets in particular certain aspects of the thought and writings of Frank Wilderson and Afropessimism,[9]<\/a>\u00a0of Partha Chatterjee\u2019s critique of cosmopolitanism,[10]<\/a> of Talal Asad\u2019s writings about the Islamic tradition,[11]<\/a> of Lauren Berlant\u2019s analysis of cruel optimism,[12]<\/a>\u00a0of David Scott\u2019s Omens of Adversity,<\/em>[13]<\/a> of Michel Foucault\u2019s genealogical method and histories of the present,[14]<\/a>\u00a0and others. The thrust of Wilder\u2019s critique is that these strands of thought have sapped the imaginative and transformative ambitions of the Left, in a way, paradoxically, that parallels the corrupting influence of neoliberalism.<\/p>\n

Let me raise here three questions, or sets of questions, for possible discussion at our seminar.<\/p>\n

1\/ Theoretical Windup<\/h1>\n

Gary Wilder begins the concrete discussion of concrete utopias on page 276 of his book, and as a result, that material (on abolition, reparations, debt cancellation, and so on) is relegated to the last 14 pages of the work. The bulk of Concrete Utopianism <\/em>focuses on the more academic, critical theoretic treatment of critical theory discourse.<\/p>\n

This raises several questions\u2014some of which I would like to put aside. For instance, substantively, whether it would be more productive, theoretically, to embrace the contradiction (for instance, represented by Afropessimism) as a way to construct a more robust utopian vision that acknowledges and incorporates the reality and intractability of antiblackness. The critiques seem to entrench, rather than overcome, the internal fissures within critical theory; they aggravate, rather than resolve, what I called in Critique & Praxis<\/em>, the \u201cinternecine battles and struggles for influence that currently plague critical philosophy,\u201d or elsewhere, the \u201cinternecine epistemological struggles between materialists and interpretivists, between foundationalists and postfoundationalists, between the Frankfurt School, Foucault, postcolonial thinkers, queer theorists and more.\u201d[15]<\/a> Or we could debate, from a strategic perspective, the productivity of picking so many fights with what are, in reality, politically, in the context of American political discourse today, outsider critical theories. Or we could ask who the audience is for these\u2014because of the material itself\u2014highly-jargoned debates. Is the audience the \u201cmass popular coalition of racialized, poor, precarious working people, along with other alienated and disenfranchised citizens\u201d who Wilder would like to see come together in a movement for societal transformation? Is it instead a vanguard of revolutionaries? Or is it, in the end, just a small clique of critical theorists who will gather after a seminar on the patio of Le Monde?<\/p>\n

I want to put those questions aside, though, to address\u2014on a more positive note\u2014the equally substantive and more important question whether and how the theoretical windup contributes to our analysis of critical<\/em>\u00a0utopian praxis<\/em>? How does all the internecine warfare enrich<\/em> our study of concrete utopias? Is it necessary, for instance, to help us think through prison abolition? Does it enrich abolitionism? Does it change how we argue for abolition? And if so, how exactly? How does it contribute to the abolitionist movement? Concretely?<\/p>\n

Concrete utopianism, Wilder writes, \u201cseeks to identify possibilities for alternative arrangements that may already dwell within, or be emerging from, the nonidentical order that actually exists.\u201d[16]<\/a> I agree entirely. But should not the project then focus on how to actualize those alternative arrangements and to develop, study, and practice those possibilities? How does the theoretical work in the first 276 pages of the book change<\/em> what we actually<\/em> say and do, or would say and do, at Standing Rock, at the Line 3 Pipeline, in Ferguson, or in Memphis?<\/p>\n

2\/ The Question of Internationalism<\/h1>\n

I embrace Gary Wilder’s invitation to internationalism. And there is no doubt that many of the concrete utopian interventions that he mentions would benefit from internationalism. The Black Lives Matter and anti-police movement in France<\/a> (surrounding the police homicide of Adama Traor\u00e9) surely benefitted from the global attention paid to the #BLM movement in the United States.\u00a0But does the movement for Black lives in the U.S. require<\/em>\u00a0internationalism? Does prison abolition or student debt relief in the U.S. require <\/em>internationalism? In his book, Wilder writes that \u201cEmancipatory alternatives require<\/em> planetary politics.\u201d[17]<\/a> Is that the right verb?<\/p>\n

The fact is, the American punitive society is exceptional in many ways\u2014and distinct from, for instance, the punitive society that Foucault presciently identified in nineteenth-century France in his lectures of that title and in Discipline and Punish\u00a0<\/em>(speaking of which, there is a whole other militant side to Foucault during the early 1970s involving prison abolition that Wilder ignores in the book[18]<\/a>). The U.S. carceral society has a unique history tied to the specific manifestations of chattel slavery and the domestic slave trade in this country, the evolution of convict leasing and plantation prisons after emancipation, Jim Crow and urban migration, and racialized mass incarceration beginning in 1973.[19]<\/a><\/p>\n

I have no doubt that the American abolitionist movement can be enriched by an internationalist perspective. In his article on \u201cPenal Abolitionism and Criminal Law Minimalism: Here and There, Now and Then,\u201d M\u00e1ximo Langer discusses the global and international movements for penal abolition, beginning in the 1960s, and how important they were as precursors and influences on prison abolition in this country and elsewhere. Thomas Mathiesen\u2019s book-length treatment calling for the abolition of prisons, The Politics of Abolition<\/em><\/a>, originally published in 1974, had enormous influence in Argentina and South America, for instance.[20]<\/a> And I\u2019m certainly not an advocate of parochialism. Nor am I arguing for the provincialization of our struggles.<\/p>\n

But I am not convinced that they always depend on or are always strengthened by internationalism. In my own political struggles\u2014for instance, my work against the death penalty in Alabama\u2014I\u2019ve often felt that taking a more local, home-grown strategy can be highly effective. For me, when I am engaged in particular struggles, it is more a question of strategy. I may well aspire, with Gary Wilder, to world transformation, not just societal transformation. I may well share an utopian idea of international solidarity. But, concretely, the international dimensions of local struggles are to me a matter of strategy, not necessity. Along these lines, I often<\/a> side with Voltaire, at least the last words of his Candide<\/em>. \u00ab\u00a0Cela est bien dit, r\u00e9pondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver son propre jardin.\u00a0\u00bb[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

3\/ On Concrete and Old-Fashioned Utopianism<\/h1>\n

A final set of questions revolves around the notion of the \u201cconcrete.\u201d The term can get confusing\u2014as we have seen in these seminars.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, some of the critical praxis that Gary Wilder mentions is not necessarily \u201cconcrete\u201d in the sense in which we are trying to use it at Utopia 13\/13. Some of the interventions are not \u201creally existing\u201d in the way in which we are attempting to focus on \u201cfunctioning, already-working practices, institutions, models and exemplars of a just society\u201d that surround us now\u2014like the ones we already have studied including Cooperation Jackson<\/a>, the Student Workers of Columbia<\/a>, Longo Ma\u00ef<\/a>, or worker cooperatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the broader ambition of internationalism that traverses Gary Wilder\u2019s book is, at the other extreme, much closer to old-fashioned utopianism of the nineteenth century than it is to the concrete utopianism of actually-existing praxis.<\/p>\n

This brings us then to the heart of the matter: the notion of the \u201cconcrete.\u201d It raises the tension between, on the one hand, the desire to identify promising practices that can exist because they already do<\/em> and the yearning to hold on to some others what might not yet exist but really should<\/em>. It is the tension, in Wilder\u2019s conception of concrete utopianism, between wanting to identify<\/p>\n