The afterlives of political ontology in The Twenty Years’ Crisis

E.H. Carr has often been treated as a Realist, in part because of his dismissal of idealism in TTYC.Footnote ²⁹ Reading Carr as a Realist however is reductive, because Carr himself stood opposed to the powerlessness he saw characterised by Realism's ‘rooted…causality’.Footnote ³⁰ It was in this spirit that Carr's opposition to the idealist belief in ‘the possibility of more or less radically rejecting reality, and substituting [their] utopia for it by an act of will’ emerged.Footnote ³¹ In such a move, Carr effectively dismissed kairos as a ‘fallacy’, placing it outside of his political ontology.Footnote ³²

Interestingly however, Carr would have been intimately familiar with the kinds of kairotic traditions he and more contemporary scholars of utopianism in IR dismiss.Footnote ³³ He had written a sympathetic account of the anarchist revolutionary Mikael Bakunin,Footnote ³⁴ and it is highly likely that Carr would have encountered period-specific revolutionaries who might not have been familiar to a broader audience. This is a reasonable speculation, especially in the case of one figure I will return to in subsequent sections, the German anarcho-socialist Gustav Landauer.Footnote ³⁵ In this case, Carr cited Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia as an important influence on TTYC.Footnote ³⁶ In Ideology and Utopia we find one of possibly the only English-language accounts (at that timeFootnote ³⁷) of Landauer, who Mannheim writes about as an exemplar of the (naïve, kairotic) utopian condition, of which he, like Carr, was dismissive.Footnote ³⁸

What Carr took from Mannheim was the latter's insistence that kairotic utopians such as Landauer enforced a dichotomy between authoritarianism and libertarianism, betraying a more complicated spectrum of authoritarian and/or libertarian tendencies.Footnote ³⁹ On the other side of the debate, Carr's aforementioned comments regarding the abdication of agency found in Realism can also be found foreshadowed in Ideology and Utopia, where Mannheim writes of the realist who calls ‘everything utopian that goes beyond the present existing order’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As such, it might appear that there is a contradiction in asserting that Carr establishes a dichotomy between chronos and kairos, given that he sought to plot a path through the dichotomy that he saw Realism and Idealism erect for each other, and more generally adopted a dialectical approach to international change.Footnote ⁴¹

However, the very fact that kairotic forms of politics are de facto ruled out of Carr's dialectical schema means that this is not a straightforward dialectical relationship between two initially opposed forces. Their potential synthesis is already made more likely because the contours of the anti or counter hegemonic force have been ontologically preordained by Carr. Kairos, because it lies outside of Carr's political ontology, is not synthesisable, and thus he cannot entertain it in his schema (just as a purely chronotic ‘rooted causality’ cannot be entertained either). For instance, even though Carr does consider challenges to the status quo as central to the conduct of international politics, these challenges are only epiphenomenal to the maintenance of the status quo (or a reformed status quo) where ‘Those who profit most by [the existing international] order can in the long run only hope to maintain it by making sufficient concessions to make it tolerable to those who profit by it least’.Footnote ⁴²

For Carr then kairotic anti-politics (anti-political because it cannot inform/transform the status quo) is in a dichotomous relationship with a chronotic politics of reasonable progress and evolutionary change. And so while Carr rejects the straitjacketed linearity of Realism, he nonetheless cleaves to a teleological principle, whereby the ‘complete utopian [rejects] the causal sequence of events’ and therefore ‘deprive[s themselves] of the possibility of changing reality’.Footnote ⁴³ ‘Reality’ is where politics proper takes place, and so kairos thus becomes a form of anti-politics prone to guaranteed failure because it is detached from existing conditions (‘the causal sequence of events’). It is this ontological feature of Carr's argument and the conceptual blackmail it produces (that places kairos outside of politics), that we see reproduced in the work of the diverse scholars of utopianism in IR, who have sought to rescue IR from a ‘shift from ideology to utopia…[that] tends to generate…images which often lie outside historical experience and time and place specificities’,Footnote ⁴⁴ in other words, outside of politics.

Echoing Carr, many scholars of utopianism in IR are explicit about the need to make utopian thinking more ‘realistic’, and to thus bring such thinking back into a chronotic and situated register. Halliday suggested that ‘A discussion of revolution that fails to address the demand for realism…may be sectarian’, while Booth advocates for a more process-oriented utopian approach, which rejects ‘end-point utopias’ in order to inform and improve the world as-it-is through what George Lawson separately calls ‘mid-range abstractions’.Footnote ⁴⁵ These are derived from historical experience that may be ‘perhaps, more modest than those offered by both utopians and dystopians alike’ but represent attempts ‘to steer, nudge, and guide world historical processes rather than transform them from some kind of tabula rasa’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The point here is not so much that all of these scholars share exactly the same chronological content (although as we will see they are not entirely distinct either). As already noted, Ken Booth presents a far more progressive chronology than any of the other scholars featured here. The point rather is that, as with Carr, chronos acts as a meta-structuring principle at the expense of kairos across the substantive scholarship of utopianism in IR.

The work of Lawson is instructive here, for in many ways his work in particular resonates with some of the more anarchist traditions considered later in in the paper.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like some scholars in IR informed by anarchist traditions,Footnote ⁴⁸ Lawson too is engaged in debates concerning interstitial and prefigurative politics as a means to engage in ‘realistic’ revolutionary programming.Footnote ⁴⁹ The limitation with some of Lawson's arguments is not so much then with the content, but the broader political ontology within which it operates, a political ontology that can also be found in Carr.Footnote ⁵⁰ We can see this ontology at work in Lawson's reading of the sociologist Erik Olin Wright, where the former takes inspiration from Wright's formulation of ‘interstitial’ strategies, from which Lawson derives a pre-defined dichotomy between ‘multiple small “r” revolutions rather than a singular big “R” Revolution’, whereby ‘big “R” Revolution presents itself as a Messiah bringing redemption to history's injustices [and] small “r” revolutions are humbler’.Footnote ⁵¹ It is not clear however that this position automatically follows from Wright. Wright suggested that while the kinds of more ‘realistic’ interstitial approaches favoured by Lawson might have transformed social conditions for small pockets of people, ‘nowhere have they succeeded in significantly eroding capitalist power relations’ and that we should not reject ‘all aspects of the ruptural [i.e. kairotic] logic of transformation’.Footnote ⁵²

Even though Wright therefore retains kairos within his own ontology of politics, reading him as an anti-kairotic thinker fits in with the broader chronotic registers and ontology in which Lawson, and other scholars considered here, implicitly operate. Read as anti-kairotic, Wright fits in perfectly with Lawson's imperative to furnish ‘small scale’ and ‘humble’ utopian projects or Halliday's desire to reclaim ‘radical and sustained non-revolutionary alternatives’ as utopian.Footnote ⁵³ Bolder visions that break radically with familiar social, political, and institutional arrangements at a societal level might then be deemed as unrealistic, or overly messianic, and thus lack the proper kind of intent.Footnote ⁵⁴ We rather should ‘think of a future that is beyond current conventions, beyond the platitudes of those in power, yet that remains within the realm of what is possible’.Footnote ⁵⁵

This is all familiar from the reading of Carr above, and rests on a subjective judgement about what is ‘possible’ transformed into a political ontology. What we have then is a form of utopian politics that presents itself as realistic in the sense of paying attention to existing historical and social conditions, and the constraints these might inevitably place on any radical project of transformation (and indeed the terrible and self-defeating violence that would be necessary to upend such conditions immediately). However, the limitation to this kind of approach is that while attention to the social is paramount in this schema, the very conditions associated with the social realm over any particular period become more or less ontological, chronologically fixed, and asocial.

Not only are kairotic interventions/ruptures seen as pointless because they are detached from material and causal conditions, but in the work of more contemporary scholars of utopianism in IR kairos becomes dangerous as well. Reflecting a particular view of 20^th century revolutionary politics as being one of overwhelming violence and authoritarianism (rather than, for instance, freedom and solidarityFootnote ⁵⁶), kairotic interventions become shorthand for the centralised violence that comes with placing ends over means. Booth for instance speculates that the European Union reflects a generalised history of kairotic violence and proof positive of the ability of humanity to construct internationally cooperative relations step-by-step. Nicholson, reflecting the more Realist tradition in which he works, writes that ‘the human capacity for cruelty, particularly in its racist forms, is unabated’ and that ‘utopian realists’ have to contend with this, as well as power, in any attempt to change world political realities. Halliday writes that the history of revolution in ‘modern times’ is not only one of resistance, heroism, and idealism, but also of ‘terrible suffering and human disaster, of chaos and incompetence’, corruption, oppression and inefficiency.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is not that these facts and assertions need to be contested (although some stand up to scrutiny better than others). The point rather is that in each case the scholar in question goes on to construct a theory of international utopianism founded upon a chronology of 20^th century kairotic violence.

It is not what individual scholars believe constitutes the proper causal sequence of events that is important here, but rather the asocial method at work, which foregrounds and ontologises relatively uniform chronologies of 20^th century history. Booth exemplifies this approach when he describes the historical evolution and expansion of what he calls the ‘global-we (common humanity)’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Booth illustrates this evolution and expansion through personal history, describing how only one of his grandparents ever travelled further than 250 km from their place of birth. This was Booth's grandfather, who fought in the First World War, of which Turkey and Great Britain were enemies (this story is narrated in an edited version of a speech given by Booth at a conference in Ankara). Booth goes on to contrast this period with his presence in Ankara, and his desire to see Turkey admitted into the European Union, as well as the ways in which the moral horizons of society have broadened, which in his grandparents’ generation ‘did not include giving money to global charities on a regular basis, or in response to disaster appeals on behalf of complete strangers in wars and earthquakes afflicting distant places’. As such, ‘the understanding of the global-we has changed markedly, in a couple of generations’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Booth's chronology rests on the West as the proactive subject of world politics, a West progressively becoming more cognisant of its place in the world, while simultaneously acting as a representative placeholder for the social and political development of that same world more broadly. As such, this geographically situated chronology becomes a universal ontology for how the world has changed and the direction in which it is moving. And yet, as many scholars have argued, such conceptions of ‘global we-ness’ are not as new as Booth imagines. White supremacists and liberal eugenicists had a ‘global we’ long before the advent of the internetFootnote ⁶⁰; religious and diasporic communities have long had a ‘global-we’, as have anti-colonial and anti-slavery movements.Footnote ⁶¹ The Haitian constitution, written in 1805, is predicated on the notion of a ‘global-we’ as constituted by the victims of colonial and racist violence everywhere.Footnote ⁶² Some of these examples are particularly pertinent given the chronology of 20^th century authoritarian statism that we have seen operating in the work of several scholars of utopianism in IR.Footnote ⁶³ And however contested and exclusive these ‘global-wes’ have been (and Booth's version could be equally contested on these terms) they have all acted for and on behalf of ‘complete strangers’ in ‘distant places’ and thus provide different chronologies of global we-ness to that which Booth provides.Footnote ⁶⁴

This is important in and of itself, but also because ignoring the plural nature of chronological history/ies can result in the dichotomous approach to chronos and kairos detailed previously, where uniform accounts of politics and anti-politics are constructed with the latter based on ‘structures which, if they are ever built, will be in conditions radically different from today’.Footnote ⁶⁵ While we see an attention paid to the potential utopian immanence of particular sets of social and material conditions in the broader scholarship of utopianism in IR,Footnote ⁶⁶ this is all limited by a tendency, also found in Carr, to overlook how different sequences of causal events might run underneath, on top, alongside, for longer, or on simply very different trajectories than other causal sequences. This thus potentially requires different responses, some of which might be kairotic, whereby kairos is thus brought into politics. These responses might, to Carr and those inspired by his approach to utopian realism, appear as beyond a normalised political ontology, and thus dangerous and unrealistic, but be entirely realistic in different and plural chronological registers.Footnote ⁶⁷

In the normalised political ontology of the realistic utopianism of Carr et al., one might question claims by Caribbean States for slave reparations, or indigenous and first nations’ claims in various sites to sovereign self-government, as representing an ‘unrealistic’ rupture with the status quo, unembedded from actual time and place specificities. However, this approach would be based on a chronology that naturalises the emergence of the international system of sovereign nation states, and makes slavery and native dispossession necessary and historical (i.e. finished) artefacts of that emergence. And yet, on different chronological registers that understand the emergence of this system as intimately tied to slavery, and as an imposition over and erasure of an already-existing international system of indigenous tribal sovereignty, all of which is ongoing and which has significant afterlives, such claims may come to be seen as perfectly reasonable, and their intent realistic.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, Carr, and those in IR influenced by his approach to utopianism, leaves the impression that some causal sequences are more important than others that is, 20^th century authoritarianisms and the Cold War.Footnote ⁶⁹ This chronology of failed and violent kairotic, unrealistic utopianisms, dictates the ontological boundary between kairotic (unrealistic and anti-political) and chronotic (political and realistic) utopianism.

In this schema, radical political failure becomes implicitly kairotic; it fails because it is kairotic, and it therefore sits outside of chronos, and outside of legitimate politics. Kairos thus becomes equated with failure, and finitude, as something that cannot exceed itself because it exists only in the past, or that if it happens in the future risks condemning utopianism to the past very quickly. Kairos can only provide salutary lessons for how not to conduct realistic utopian praxis in a self-reinforcing cycle where the only legitimate form of utopian politics is that which exists in dialectical relation to the status quo. This is the conceptual blackmail upon which scholarship on utopianism in IR rests; utopian politics is only possible if it is embedded in a preordained (ontological) chronotic register, where forms of utopian prefiguration distinct from this register are labelled as kairotic and unrealistic, doomed to fail rather than indicative of unrealised beginnings. We see this blackmail in the conditioning effects of institutionalised power that informs Booth's step-by-step approach to denuclearisation, Halliday's Carr-esque proclamation that ‘a responsibility of critique has to be matched by a responsibility of plausibility’, or Lawson's emphasis on ‘recognising existing constraints on political action, principally those that [are] institutional and historical in content’.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, as we have seen when discussing Booth's ‘global we-ness’, what seems plausible is not necessarily an ontological fact, and yet is too often treated as such by many of the scholars discussed thus far.

Erecting plausibility as political ontology results in an unnecessarily narrowed-down set of political opportunities, whether for reform or transformation. And projecting this ontology back through the past can result in the too-quick dismissal of political projects that ‘failed’, according to a limited chronological account of world history. One implication of all of this is to (re)consider what IR theory is for. The IR theory that emerges from Carr and reappears in some of those who have more recently worked on utopianism in IR is underpinned by a set of assumptions that transform into ontology concerning the anti-political violence and invalidity of kairos. This produces a dichotomy between chronos and kairos, where the latter is almost paradoxically conceived of in chronotic terms of finitude and failure. As a place of often violent endings, nothing can emerge from kairos, which is thus fundamentally anti-political. A narrow form of chronos thus becomes the register of politics, where time-bounded observable outcomes occur (because only these are ‘realistic’). The relationship between change and realism is thus naturalised in a self-reinforcing loop that results in the aforementioned conceptual blackmail. As well as ruling out kairotic interventions as undesirable (because they normally lead to authoritarian statism that is violent and hegemonic) or unrealisable, this also rules out any consideration of interventions that do not result in observable change on the premise that these must also be kairotic and are therefore not realistic (because they have failed). As such, interventions conducted on different and longer or more plural chronological registers risk being characterised as kairotic, where kairos acts as a placeholder for unrealistic interventions, prone to failure. Failure in turn becomes equated with finitude and only becomes relevant in instructing contemporary struggles about the boundaries between realistic and unrealistic utopic praxis. The next section considers what happens for an analysis of and normative approach to revolutionary change if this proposition is inverted.

Intentional unintentionality

Much of the conceptual blackmailing noted in the previous sections rests on the place of intent within utopic praxis. For scholars on utopianism in IR, it is clear that, first, intentionality is central (i.e. Booth's ‘desired physical goal’ of utopic praxis, or Lawson's ‘mid-range’ objectivesFootnote ⁷¹), and second, that any intent that does not cohere with ‘realism’ is either dangerous or simply unrealisable and thus prone to failure, narrowly understood on its own terms. Intent, in the sense of pre-ordained and measureable outcomes, is therefore very intentional (i.e. a chronotic politics of a prescribed range of outcomes).

There are scholars writing within disciplinary IR who attempt to tackle the issue of radical kairotic intent, cognisant of the authoritarian tendencies associated with this form of politics. Berenskötter for instance seeks to mediate between the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of what he calls ‘the vision thing’ in IR, and the simultaneously expressive and enclosing dynamics that utopian visions produce (expressive because they break from norms, enclosing because they risk ruling out further evolutions).Footnote ⁷² For Berenskötter visions are ontological, in that they are ‘a source of energy which motivates, mobilizes, and moves the Self forward’.Footnote ⁷³ However, the elephant in the room here is perhaps the problem with any kind of vision at all. IR scholarship on utopianism has seemingly been too caught up in Berenskötter's ‘vision thing’, whether this be of the long range or mid-range variety.

Rather than engage in debates concerning the right kind of vision or intent then (which would risk re-inscribing ontological forms of chronos), it is worth considering what kind of utopian politics might emerge from resisting the temptation to hang on to visions and pre-ordained intent. Scholarship on utopianism and intent from outside of disciplinary IR is helpful here. Sargisson for instance finds that intentional communities often break down when the initial intent of the community coming together is dissolved by ongoing political demands and contestations, which often dilute founding values, and subjects them to competing intentions and desires.Footnote ⁷⁴ In this sense then intent is always agonistic, and just as much of a social construction as what is considered realistic at any given moment. Intent therefore cannot be predetermined by what is realistic and what is not, even if agonism leads to the demise of the utopic praxis/project in question. As such, an intended intent is self-defeating, as it will always produce a hard vision incompatible with other forms of intentionality at play (which returns us to Berenskötter's argument, and which is characteristic of the ‘mid-range’ or ‘practical’ utopian horizons validated by IR scholars of utopianismFootnote ⁷⁵).

We are presented here with a potential problem regarding how we transition from individual to collective action. Whereas the individual may be able avoid intentional forms of intent, the very process of collective organisation surely requires strategy and tactics, and thus more intentional forms of intent. Indeed, it is the agonism inherent in competing forms of intent that Sargisson suggests ultimately dissolves intentional communities. We seem to be faced either with an inherently self-defeating form of unintentional politics, or a harder more hegemonic (and authoritarian-spectrum) form of politics. The political philosopher and cultural critic Frederic Jameson provides a potential path out of this seeming impasse. Suggesting that the appeal of utopianism is enhanced by its seemingly kairotic inability to ‘[furnish] an account of agency…[or] have a coherent historical and practical-political picture of transition’, for Jameson, what in the past might have been considered weaknesses of open and unintentional forms of utopianism have now become strengths in a context where the ability to provide roadmaps or detailed pictures of the future, or accounts of the ‘true’ revolutionary subject offer no answers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Instead, we are forced ‘to think of the break itself’ rather than ‘offering … a more traditional picture of what things would look like after the break’. This is ‘a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealisable in its own right’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This would therefore suggest that in order to sustain a collective utopian programme that avoids authoritarianism, any intent must be limited solely to a rupture from the status quo, with subsequent outcomes unintended, the product of ongoing negotiations and responses to changing material conditions.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ultimately this may be an aspirational form of politics, but it is one that focusses on keeping chronotic pre-ordination at bay.

This represents something quite different from the extant scholarship on utopianism in IR, which while rejecting end-points and foregrounding process and means, hangs on to mid-point visions and has a necessarily narrow conception of means, ontologically bordered as they are by what is considered ‘realistic’. In a context where history does not present as a singular or universal representation of lived experiences,Footnote ⁷⁹ and does not move smoothly forward from desire and intent to outcome, a compulsion to ‘think the break’, as Jameson suggests, means that the outcomes of such an approach, even if they fail, cannot be taken on their own terms. If the break is centred firmly on itself, ruling out any consideration of what might come afterwards, then this not only closes down exclusive chronotic thinking and the de-politicisation of kairos by removing any form of ‘realistic’ horizon, but simultaneously pluralises the manner by which we understand the unfolding of world and political time. All outcomes now become possible. Failure now becomes only one way of framing kairotic praxis, and escapes ontology. Failure instead exceeds itself, becoming a time-contextualised manifestation of a phenomenon that does not by itself capture its full resonance across plural registers, and thus can be a resource for thinking alternatively about the way that IR scholarship reflects on and seeks to inform radical structural transformation. A utopianism that has no intended observable outcome, that is focussed purely on kairotic means, does not necessarily equate with nihilism and ‘failure’ (in the finite sense). Instead, one might read this as a necessarily unintended intentionality, an intention to have no intent, and as the recognition of the long-term self-defeatism of a more rigidly intentional form of intentionality, whether of end-point or mid-range varieties. This means reconsidering why we would label kairotic utopic interventions as ‘failures’, and taking seriously what I will now call a ‘no-point’ utopic praxis, which could help transcend the ‘end-point’/‘mid-range’ (i.e. kairos/chronos) dichotomy established by many scholars of utopianism in IR.

No-point utopianism

As an anti-authoritarian and radically pluralist tradition dedicated to radical social transformation, certain anarchist trends are helpful in fleshing out how a means-focussed intentional unintentionality relates to utopianism, and forms of failure that exceed themselves. Anarchism is of course not the only political tradition to foreground means over ends. Environmental, peace, and civil rights movements have all at various points engaged in prefigurative, means-focussed forms of politics. That said, the more prefigurative elements of these movements have generally had a close and sometimes explicit relationship to anarchist ideas/writers and other radical currents.Footnote ⁸⁰ These traditions have also had a tendency, to greater and lesser degrees, to re-embed themselves in chronotic forms of politics.Footnote ⁸¹ While this paper does not therefore seek to present Anarchism as the only tradition capable of reimagining utopic praxis and its relationship to failure, it clearly stands as an analytically useful tradition with which to engage on this issue, both for its broader influence, and in the case presented here, its reluctance to engage in chronotic forms of politics.

While some have sought to bring anarchism to bear on sub-categories of IR, for instance global civil society, nationalism, state surveillance practices and security studies, anarchism has had little impact on mainstream accounts of IR, or conceptual development within the discipline.Footnote ⁸²

Within this under-utilised tradition is a figure who themself is under-utilised (see footnote 35), but is instructive here. Given the centrality of the revolutionary anarcho-socialist, critic, writer, publisher and organiser Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) to Mannheim's original dichotomisation of kairotic and chronotic utopianism (and the labelling of the former as prone to failure), it is instructive to explore him in a little more detail. Contra Mannheim, Landauer operated beyond the chronos/kairos dichotomy, and so helps to furnish a no-point utopianism that can build on the utopian scholarship of Jameson and Sargisson considered above. Landauer was a major protagonist of the Munich uprising during the 1918/19 German Revolution (during the denouement of which he was murdered by state freikorps), and, when the Bavarian Soviet Republic was declared in November 1918 was invited to Munich to support the uprising. Unlike perhaps the most prominent revolutionary of that time, Rosa Luxemburg, Landauer eschewed her dedication to a distinct form of ends-focussed praxis that sought to usurp and re-purpose state power on a revolutionary basis, albeit on improvisational terms. Indeed, it was this, and the primacy that Luxemburg's Spartacists placed on party unity, that was the basis of Landauer's falling out with the latter.Footnote ⁸³

Landauer's prefigurative ruptural ideas can best be summed up by the way in which he distinguished his own praxis from the ideology of the scientific socialism with which he was familiar, writing that ‘The difference between us socialists… and the communists is not that we have a different model of a future society. The difference is that we do not have any model. We embrace the future's openness and refuse to determine it. What we want is to realize socialism, doing what we can for its realization now’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although intent remains central here (‘we want to realise socialism’) this is a highly embedded form of intent, as it has no ‘model’ and refuses to determine one. It sits explicitly in the break, or rupture, seeking to create an immanent form of socialism that refuses to preordain what might come afterwards. This distinguishes Landauer from the ‘practical’ or ‘realistic’ utopianism of Carr and other scholars working in this tradition. On the one hand, Landauer rejected ‘end-point’ utopian thinking as the preserve of those who believed in ‘the so-called materialistic conception of history… in their Darwinistic garb…’ and who were ‘the plague of our times and the curse of the socialist movement’.Footnote ⁸⁵ On the other hand, this did not lead him to adopt some kind of ‘mid-range’ utopianism either as a means of firewalling utopian politics off from the anti-politics of kairos. ‘We do not have any model’; this means that there is no end-point, nor a mid-point, but simply no-point, a non-horizon.

In some respects, this cleaves quite closely to the interstitial strategy of Wright.Footnote ⁸⁶ As was noted above however, in terms of how Wright has been incorporated into utopian scholarship in IR, Landauer provides a much broader scope, rejecting the notion that historical and institutional arrangements must by necessity wholly sculpt the possibilities of radical transformation, simply that they must be recognised and confronted. In this vein, Landauer wrote of the relation between actually existing conditions and the no-point of his revolutionary utopianism:

These words are familiar in the context of realistic approaches to utopianism in IR. It is however what Landauer goes on to write that distinguishes his utopianism from much of this later work:

This points to how an analysis of existing conditions does not necessarily have to result in ‘practical’, ‘realistic’ or fully thought out forms of projected utopianism. This is precisely because Landauer's position was fully cognisant of the overwhelming nature of existing social and political conditions, and how a strategy based purely around an engagement with these conditions would simply reinforce them. It was the overwhelming nature of these conditions that made an anarchic response that deprioritised any form of intended pre-conceived outcome necessary. The fin-de-siècle German state was constituted by and productive of a very particular set of deeply authoritarian conditions. Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider Landauer's position outside of this context, and how the intentionality he operated with was wrapped up in the practice of kairotic forms of intervention, rather than necessarily in the planning for what might come after, or the observable and empirical outcomes; an intentionally point-less form of utopianism. Prefiguring Wright's ‘real’ utopianism, which is both ruptural and interstitial, this was an absolutely ‘real’ position to take, one which was point-less because it refused to pre-ordain the future, yet also distinctly kairotic, because it sought radical and immediate social transformation. As such, this was a politics that was conditioned by its simultaneous possibility/impossibility. Landauer's was a struggle for the utopian good-place (chronos), which was co-eval with the utopian no-place (kairos). It sat, explicitly, in Jameson's ‘break’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Dissolving the chronos/kairos dichotomy to reconstitute failure

The last section suggested that dissolving the kairos/chronos dichotomy that is present in much scholarship on utopianism in IR enables an incorporation of pointlessness into an analytical and conceptual framework of utopianism. In this section the dissolution of the kairos/chronos dichotomy will be laid out more fully, showing that doing so allows for a reconsideration of ‘failure’ as simply one facet of a plural set of outcomes. As argued above, in understanding failure as multifaceted, and exceeding itself, it can become a politically productive site for IR Theory to reflect on in considering intellectual resources for the conceptualisation of radical social transformation.

Thinking in Jameson's aforementioned ‘break’ helps bring to the fore the simultaneity of kairos and chronos, which is important in helping to move beyond the kinds of dichotomies that exist in scholarship on utopianism in IR. Thinking kairos and chronos together is more than a dialectical move. Rather, it is a form of simultaneity that makes one impossible without the other; where in fact they are not ‘other’ to each other at all. This is because remaining in the break with the status quo reminds us that every lived, chronotic moment is imbued with radical transcendence, and that the steady march of time can only appear to be steady because of the possibilities that always exist to rupture it; its steadiness is conditioned by its inverse. As such, we might remain in Jameson's ‘break’ not because there is no alternative we can possibly imagine, but because there is every alternative we can possibly imagine, and remaining in the ‘now’ might be the only way of conceiving of them. In this way we might reinforce normative calls from IR scholars for open-dialectical and deliberative forms of utopianism that could broaden ‘the horizon of our conceptions of possibility and offer…long term goals to our endeavours in world politics’ in non-deterministic ways.Footnote ⁸⁹ This can be achieved by providing analytical lenses through which we can interrogate how these broader horizons are an already existing and intrinsic characteristic of the everyday, with lessons that we might learn for the conduct of radical praxis. The kind of no-point utopianism found with Landauer can therefore expand the political ontology of IR Theory beyond that established by those embedded in a ‘realist’ reading of utopianism.

When Brincat, in an exception to IR scholarship on utopianism, suggests that ‘We cannot set sail for [utopia], since it resides most vitally in the now’,Footnote ⁹⁰ the metaphor is evocative of a similarly minded scholar, the philosopher Ernst Bloch. Bloch was a contemporary and friend of Gustav Landauer, and although he didn't identify as an anarchist, was similarly idiosyncratic in his radical socialism.Footnote ⁹¹ Like Brincat, Bloch deploys the metaphor of sailing and in doing so illustrates the function of dissolving the chronos/kairos dichotomy:

In Bloch's earlier work, and like Landauer,Footnote ⁹³ he believed that utopic praxis had to be self-produced and maintained, and that the social form that would emerge would therefore be a product of the process of engaging in the praxis itself, a form of means over ends.Footnote ⁹⁴ Unlike Landauer however, Bloch navigated under the convention of a chronology that held the human condition to be engaged in an ‘invariancy of direction’ towards emancipation,Footnote ⁹⁵ in the process establishing a utopic horizon that risks reintroducing chronos and preordination.

Nonetheless, it is valuable to consider Bloch's sailing metaphor. Here, we find a position that puts entirely into question the dichotomy between chronos and kairos found in the work of Carr and other utopian scholarship in IR. Implicated in existing conditions, a pure and singular chronos is clearly ruled out by Bloch as a temporal register for transformation. The alternative to chronos for Bloch however is not the kairos of the utopian realist imagination, complete and immediate transformation, for this would be to engage in fantasism, or, as Landauer held, a fallacy of trying to determine the future.Footnote ⁹⁶ The politics of a no-point utopic praxis rather had to reside in the present, and be cognisant of, but not reduced to, ‘real motion’.Footnote ⁹⁷

This poses an interesting issue concerning presentism. Despite the calls from Carr and the diverse range of scholars who cite him to heed the lessons of history and to remain embedded in present conditions,Footnote ⁹⁸ all of these scholars share degrees of path-dependent presentism. As highlighted earlier, they mostly read present social and political conditions/institutional arrangements and utopian possibilities through a 20^th century historiography of authoritarian statism. Rather than this path-dependency, an alternative approach would be, as Hutchings suggests, to pluralise our chronological perspectives.Footnote ⁹⁹ This would include the incorporation of alternative chronologies that have not yet unfolded, so that being embedded in existing social and material conditions does not result in path dependent chronotic solutions. This would instead locate politics in both these multiple chronologies, but also kairos, via the imagination of multiple and endless ‘alternative worlds’ that remain utterly rupturing of but embedded ‘most vitally in the now’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This is clearly a different form of presentism to that located in the utopian realist scholarship considered earlier (where Halliday for instance explicitly locates imagining and dreaming as a form of safety valve for otherwise dangerous tendenciesFootnote ¹⁰¹).

This is a form of presentism that dissolves chronos into kairos, and can only be a contradiction if they are held to be mutually exclusive, one being the ontological site of politics, the other not. Interestingly, Hutchings also engages in this dichotomisation, using the plurality of chronos to dispense with kairotic forms of analysis and intervention altogether.Footnote ¹⁰² However, and as noted previously, in my reading of the chronos/kairos relationship, these two terms are not on a spectrum, but rather constitute each other, whereby kairos conditions chronos and vice versa. Indeed, arguably multiple chronologies only become possible in many cases because of kairotic ruptures, or ‘breaks’ as Jameson suggests, and it is therefore potentially limiting to think that kairos automatically involves settling the ‘the question of progress in advance’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Rather, if kairos is pure break, pure rupture, the source of multiple and unknown chronologies, it can have no pre-ordination whatsoever. Dissolving the ontological distinction between kairos and chronos helps to avoid the necessary conceptualisation of utopianism as representing either aspiring end-points or mid-range solutions, and also demands us to read failure not as such (i.e. singular, in the past, and evidence of unrealistic utopianism), but instead as an archival resource and normative referent for as yet unrealised, unplanned for utopic outcomes. This kind of ‘no-point’ utopian frame rests on the form of intentional unintentionality articulated earlier, and provides a way of reconceiving the utopic analytical lens of IR as necessarily plural, divorced from ontological dichotomies of success/failure, realism/unrealism, and chronos/kairos.

Of course, taking failure seriously at an intellectual level must not blind us to the costs incurred by those engaged in what are often life and death struggles to transform oppressive conditions. And yet failure remains an ever-present that shadows and often overcomes radical and even reformist or realistic utopianism. We waste the energies and commitments of those who engage in such utopic praxis when as a scholarly community we only consider failure as being unrealistic and finite, unable to exceed itself, and thus politically and normatively unproductive. It is useful at this point to return to Gustav Landauer. Landauer's murder by state-backed friekorps in May 1919 after the defeat of the Spartacist Red Army at Munich following the encircling of the city by state forces, might be a reminder of the kinds of criticisms of political naiveté laid at the feet of utopians (and in Mannheim's case Landauer specifically) by their more ‘realistic’ critics.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Briefly placing ourselves in Landauer's shoes however can help furnish a concept of failure as politically productive, escaping the singular chronotic confines of much utopian scholarship in IR.

The murders of Landauer's contemporaries Rosa Luxembourg and her fellow Spartacist Karl Liebknecht in January 1919, and the assassination in March 1919 of Kurt Eisner, his close friend and prime minister of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, who had invited him to Munich in the first place, might have given Landauer pause for thought about staying on in the city. With the impending fall of Munich and his public profile as a revolutionary and self-identifying Jew, Landauer would have known that his life was in significant mortal danger, and yet, given the opportunity to flee the city he refused.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ An important backdrop to his refusal, and one that makes it more significant, is that he was far from cheery about the prospects of the revolution from soon after its outset.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And yet, he still went to Munich at Eisner's request in November 1918, and remained there throughout several predicted disappointments, including Eisner's assassination and the subsequent reassertion of centrist power by the city's social democrats, and then the usurpation of this power by the vanguardist Spartacists, with whom there was mutual antipathy.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nonetheless, and despite being sidelined by the Spartacists, Landauer remained in Munich for another 2 weeks, working and agitating with worker and peasant cooperatives, up to his death.

One can choose to read Landauer's death in a way that forces us to reconsider judgements concerning success, change and defeat in utopian politics, and failure as existing in excess of itself, and thus as a productive site/category of learning for IR Theory. Not long before his capture and death, Landauer had written to the theatre director and actor Louise Dumont-Lindemann that ‘…the ability to remain in the midst of it all, as if led by a different star, only comes to someone who has seen it all happen long before’, adding; ‘we are working for coming generations’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The sense of being of the past (‘long before’), present and future all at once, permeates these sensibilities.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ According to David, it was Landauer's assessment that the contemporaneous farce of the Munich uprising (with its regular usurpations and constant factional infighting) must be imbued with a universal morality accessible to future generations, generations of which he was already a part, that led him to remain in Munich, where he would have known that his death, as much as that of the revolution's, was almost assured.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Writing from Munich, he summed his position up as being one of the ‘thousands of tiny, decentralised beginnings’ that ‘the peaceful creation of socialism needs… as much as revolutionary energy and power concentrated in one point’.Footnote ¹¹¹

In one sense then, Landauer arguably conceived of the utopianism of revolution as necessarily pointless, while his death, and the death of the revolution, had every conceivable (chronotic) and inconceivable (kairotic) point. This was an intended non-intentionality, a no-point utopic praxis mounted not in the name of a measurable or identifiable empirical outcome, but simply to stand as a reference point and way of doing politics for other predicted and unpredicted struggles. It represented a plurality of chronotic outcomes pregnant with ever-present and unpredictable kairotic opportunities. The revolution was already becoming subjected to hegemonic and universalist pretensions by the time Landauer got to Munich, and yet he stayed, not for this revolution, but for all revolutions. His presence was not based on some alternative end-point that he envisaged, nor a reformist approach to revolutionary organising. His presence in Munich had ‘no-point’, and yet because of this, every point.

Of course this is a highly interpretive reading of events that we can ultimately only have partial insight into, and yet this does not reduce the capacity of this account to assist us in thinking differently about the form and function of utopianism for and in IR. What Landauer's death points to is a possibility for reappraising kairotic ‘failure’, and even death, as important sites for the ‘excavation of [utopian] fragments and shards’,Footnote ¹¹² and as deeply political processes. As such, a utopianism based on such an exercise would not automatically characterise these forms of intervention as an anti-political form of kairos associated with the authoritarian statism of the 20^th century, nor as unrealistic.Footnote ¹¹³ Such interventions might be so, but only become necessarily so when they are placed into a form of ontological and path-dependent chronology that is characteristic of some scholars who advocate for greater ‘realism’ in IR's utopianism. The concluding section turns to how this myopic view of utopianism paradoxically overlooks real-world appraisals of contemporary radical politics, and the kind of utopian politics made possible by the anarchic form of no-point utopianism outlined above.