"Messy Utopia" - Essay with Rasa Weber published at Ztscript #39

 

 

 

Two years ago, my good friend and designer Rasa Weber and me started to write a text on an idea that we have touched many times in our exciting conversations: the idea of a certain "messy utopia" - a new, yet minoritarian utopianism that shimmers through "newer" discourses such as New Materialism, Post-Humanism, Living Architecture, etc.  In this utopianism, the messy and the unclear are no longer to be avoided, but some sort of ideal state for the more-than-human living (and thriving). 

As it goes, two years later, we both felt a bit further in our thinking than back then, but I still enjoyed reading these ventures out into a "messy utopia" and I would even argue that I have found an almost concrete political program that is behind this messy utopianism (among so much else) by now: ZADism and the anarchist cult-book bolo'bolo. I will also keep working and publishing on this concept of "messy utopias", for I still find it very useful to think with.

You can find more about ZTScript, the wonderful Magazine that published our text, here: https://www.ztscrpt.net/

There will be a little release event tomorrow, Saturday the 16th of September 2023, in Vienna at NKW. More info here.

For now I will leave you with the opening lines of the text, which sets the tone for the rest:

How can we put aside our all-too-modern notions of human control over an orderly cosmos and learn to find forms of utopian engagement within the mess of a much-more-than-human planet?

A white, orderly and rectangular world in which the human is in control: When hearing the word "utopia," most would probably associate it with sleek, clean and smooth shapes. We all know such images from various Sci-Fi Movies and architectural renderings. You could say they look like Le Corbusier’s wildest dreams come true. Even in their greenwashed, more contemporary version, one feature remains: No mess is allowed in these ideal places. Everything is under (human) control. However, in certain progressive niches of discourse across various disciplines, we are witnessing a phenomenon we propose to call “messy utopia”. We seem to be experiencing a valorization of the messy, the impure and dirty, stimulated by microbiology, chaos theory, quantum physics, New Materialism and other post-anthropocentric models of thought. A new but still underrepresented utopianism seeks to set aside all-too-modern notions of human control, clean surfaces, and orderly forms, and learn to find intricate, unruly and feral ways of utopian engagement in the mess of a much more-than-human planet.