Seeing the ‘ordinary extraordinary’ everyday: educated hope in everyday life
Sarah Amsler
A talk given at Beyond Glorious: The Radical in Engaged Artistic Practices
29 May–2 June, 2013
London, UK
Positioning
As I will be talking about radical pedagogy and radical democracy, I want to explain what I
mean by these terms. I use the word ‘radical’ in two ways. Both grow metaphorically from the
image of the root and histories of radical thought. On the one hand, radicality is a way of
knowing the world which seeks knowledge of the deep conditions of individual and collective
existence, and to find ways beyond whatever obstructs this project. But it is also an
orientation towards the world that makes experimental paths through submerged terrain
which has not yet been tilled or explored, which believes there is potential for nourishment
even in the most unlikely of and forbidden places, and which believes this is necessary for
vitality. I like Michael Fielding and Peter Moss’s definition of radicalism ‘as transcendence…a
set of aspirations that stretch beyond the reach of innovation to imagine and enact a future
that rests on very different assumptions and values to those which define the basis of the
current system’ (2011, p. 41). In educational work, radicalism thus takes various forms: the
critique of knowledge, the cultivation of creative imagination, certain kinds of research,
testing of the unknown, encounters with the strange and the new, a faith in the possibility of
oneself and others, and a commitment to creating conditions for these activities in all areas
of our lives.
I worked for most of my life in mainstream politics, art and education, and am now engaged
in practices which are sometimes described as more ‘radical’. My contribution today
emerges from recent difficulties in explaining what I do and why I do it to people who
sometimes find it unusual or undesirable, and from a tension between the emancipatory
promises of radical pedagogy and democracy, on the one hand, and the exclusive circles of
people for whom these are intelligible or transformative, on the other. This is not a tension
that I would like to resolve; I do not wish to radicalise all of everyday life or domesticate
radical thought and practices. I wouldn’t need to, as they are already intertwined – the stuff
of radical possibility is in life itself and lives are most liveable when moved freely by curiosity,
creativity and critical encounter. But the kinds of cultural work which can reveal and
strengthen these connections are not necessarily the kinds of work that define themselves
as ‘radical’, and in some cases are practices which are treated with disdain as ‘ordinary’.
In work that is explicitly critical or transgressive, one’s immediate public or community is
likely to be other people who are either engaged in creative projects of self and social
transformation, or whose existence necessitates ways of thinking, learning and acting that
are radically opposed to the dominant forms. Such practices can create liberating and risky
spaces for playful experimentation, free dialogue, human connection and critical activity.
However, they can also insulate participants not just from the challenges of those who are
excluded from or silenced by the practices themselves, but also from deeper questions
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about what makes such practices possible. It is easy to overestimate the transformative
power of discrete practices as it is to underestimate the conditions that make them possible.
It is also easy to confuse privileged or forced experiences of transformative learning with
evidence of the viability of radical democratic politics on a larger scale.
My concern is less with how to improve physical or cognitive access to cultural work that is
self-defined as radical creative, and more with finding ways of opening up space for radical
ways of thinking, being, relating and acting in everyday life.
Can we all be radical democrats now?
In the autumn of 2011, Judith Butler was asked whether she felt the global financial crisis of
2008 had caused the new waves of social unrest that were rolling out in Greece and across
the world. She replied that ‘the call on the streets is…not to “fix” this fiscal crisis, but to insist
that the dismantling of neo-liberalism is imperative for the renewal of radical democracy’
(Butler 2011a).
But this statement begs a question. What is radical democracy? What could it mean to
renew it, or to cultivate it in our everyday lives? For whom is this project meaningful? More
importantly, as challenging hegemonic systems of power and democratising social
relationships have been described as difficult and ‘infinitely demanding’ activities can the
radicalisation of either really become conceivable as a politics for everyday life?
To be sure, it is becoming obvious that our dominant economic and political institutions are
failing people – radically – and that we need to learn how to transform the ways we live in
some very counter-intuitive ways in order to survive with dignity. At the same time, the
locking-in of state and corporate power has made it harder for people to believe that this is
possible, and the organisation of everyday life around these logics of power has made it
harder for us to desire it. There is, in other words, a crisis of hope. As the philosopher
Nikolas Kompridis has argued, we therefore need ‘cultural practices that can reopen the
future and unclose the past…that can regenerate hope and confidence in the face of
conditions that threaten to make even their regeneration meaningless [...] practices that can
facilitate the renewal of utopian energies…’ (2006: 277).
The belief that such practices exist, and that they are aesthetic and educative and political
practices, motivates a great deal of socially engaged art, critical pedagogies and relational
activism. And yet, in discussions around art, education and activism, we seem to be stuck in
repetitive debates about how radical practices either remain marginal to the people and
problems they seek to engage, and whether engulfing them in radical practice is another
form of tyranny in the shape of participation. In my work, I have been interested in a third
kind of radical pedagogy – one that is rooted in the heart of everyday life in dominant
institutions rather than on their margins, and that is not dependent upon ‘participation’ as a
discrete relation to art and education, but on receptivity to the possibility of radical being in
everyday life.
In order to engage with radical work, we must first be receptive to change – and that this
receptivity cannot be taken for granted as pre-existing or ‘taught’ in a didactic way
(Kompridis 2006). But, where conditions for receptivity do not already exist what ‘possibility2
enabling practices’ open paths for their emergence? This question has practical importance,
as it is asked regularly by artists and educators working in ‘frontline communities’, who
explain how exhausting it can be to participate in long-term projects to facilitate ‘possibilityenabling practices’ in complex assemblages of institutional power which sometimes appear
almost hopelessly foreclosed.
Their experiences help us understand why we are both seldom open to radical thinking and
practice, and at the same time always potentially prepared to be. They also have the
potential to resolve a paradox that the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse once referred to as a
‘vicious circle’ of liberation. He argued that any ‘rupture with the self-propelling conservative
continuum of needs must precede the revolution which is to usher in a free society, but such
rupture itself can be envisaged only in a revolution’ (Marcuse 1969; see also 1964: 250). In
other words, he presupposed that we were trapped by working not only within the existing
conditions of our existence but in their dominant logics. He was unable to imagine how
processes of becoming-other could be revolutionary prior to a discernible revolution, or to
believe that multiple rationalities, plural ways of knowing and being, and alternative kinds of
relationships shape our orientation towards both present and future.
The notion of prefiguration, despite all its flaws, allows us to at least imagine this possibility,
and to recognise the extraordinary dimensions of our ordinary lives that offer opportunities
for radical being. However, two important points are often ignored in work on prefigurative
politics. One is that democracy, in its radical forms, is a socially and emotionally exhausting
kind of politics. It implies an intense logic of practice which has the ambivalent qualities of
being simultaneously exhilarating and depleting, comforting and terrifying, liberating and
paralysing, and joyous and painful (Trowell 2012). As one educational activist admitted in an
interview, ‘I don’t think transformation is only liberatory or exhilarating. It can be quite painful
and a fraught process.’ It has this been argued that only certain types of people – by dint of
subjectivity or social position – can successfully engage in such activities.
The other point which is often eclipsed by the enthusiastic affirmation of prefigurative radical
democracy is that democratising decisions which affect everyday life is not synonymous with
the egalitarian distribution of wealth, resources and material conditions of possibility for all. It
is this abstraction of democratic politics from economic power and singular emphasis on the
cultural dimensions of ‘possibility-enabling practices’ which has led to arguments that
prefigurative practice may not be a revolutionary political form, but an uncritical celebration
of symbolic micro-politics whose primary effect is to ‘buttress capital as they circulate
political affects while displacing political struggles from the streets to the galleries’ (2012:
13).
Thus, we cannot presume that ‘radical democracy’ is an adequate way of conceptualising
egalitarian, democratic and humane ways of life, and cannot presume, if it did suffice, that it
would be desirable. I would therefore like to understand what kinds of work socially engaged
educators, artists and activists undertake – or indeed, undergo – to make radically
democratic principles and practices viable possibilities in everyday life. What material, social,
cognitive, semantic, and affective conditions are conductive to opening up these possibilities,
once they can be imagined?
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Can there be a politics of possibility for everyday life?
Recently, we have seen a lot of spectacular politics which, to many people participating or
looking on, seem quite radical: the global student and increasingly children’s movements
against corporate education, the political revolts and revolutions in North Africa and the
Middle East, the Occupy phenomenon and the return of situationist-style performance in
reclaimed public spaces. In different ways, these critical-experimental practices of resistance
and creativity at least interrupt the ‘crisis of hope’ by being demonstrably possible in
environments where politics were presumed to be more or less dead. Commentators have
argued that ‘Occupy is the becoming-conscious of a deep disaffection with normal politics,
particularly among the young’ (Critchley 2012b), that it captures the imagination because it
affects, evoking a ‘sense of aliveness’ and affirming our ‘changeability’ (Massumi 2002: 15),
and that it ‘caught on’ because ‘most Americans are far more willing to embrace radical
ideas than anyone in the established media is willing to admit’ (Graeber 2011b). There
seems to be an assumption that the idea of radical politics is now popular, and that this is
produces hope which serves as the basis for new kinds of a politics of possibility.
The ‘politics of possibility’ is a name for a kind of politics which offers a ‘vision of
transformation as a continual struggle to change subjects, places and conditions of life under
inherited circumstances of difficulty and uncertainty’, and in doing so to ‘prefigure’
alternatives (Gibson-Graham 2006: xxvii). It is also the name for a political imaginary that
Gibson–Graham argues has been ‘radically altering the established spatiotemporal frame of
progressive politics, reconfiguring the position and role of the subject, [and] shifting the
grounds for assessing the efficacy of political movements and initiatives’ in recent years
(Gibson-Graham 2006: xix). Like many other social movements that are anarchistic in
nature, it does not presume that direct struggle against dominant groups, institutions or
ideologies is always an effective or plausible strategy of resistance against hegemonic forms
of power.
Interest in prefigurative forms of political activity is not new. It was in Emma Goldman’s
(1924) injunction that the ends of any revolution must be visible in its means; in John
Dewey’s (1939) dream of a ‘creative democracy’ that would facilitate ‘a freer and more
humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute’; and in Albert Camus’
(1946) argument that the only way to ensure global peace was to abandon hope in extant
political institutions and ‘reconsider everything from the ground up, so as to shape a living
society inside a dying society’. Goldman, Dewey and Camus did not identify themselves as
radical democrats. It is rather their refusal to confuse institutionalised regimes of democratic
politics with lived experiences of freedom, and their insistence that the critique – and where
necessary the dismantling – of these institutions is a condition of democracy itself, which
makes them exemplars of this sensibility.
A politics of possibility works through processes of ‘disengagement and reconstruction rather
than by reform or revolution; with the end of creating not a new knowable totality (counterhegemony), but of enabling experiments and the emergence of new forms of subjectivity’
(Day 2011: 108, 113). This kind of politics encourages dissensus, critical openness to
difference, the decentring and ‘tearing away’ of certainties, and a commitment to continual
transformation. It is prefigurative because it seeks to create new worlds that embody these
principles by working within and using the resources of the existing one, with particular
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attention to the micro-politics of space, time, language, the body and the emotions which
frame all of the above (Gibson-Graham 2006: xxvii).
While there is not scope to explore the full meaning of prefigurative politics here, it is worth
explaining the characteristics of the forms of prefiguration that I am concerned with:
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A critique of capitalism and visions of its alternatives
Radical politics here means commitment to social, political and economic justice in both
the concrete struggles of everyday life and at global scale, but always-already here and
now, rather than elsewhere in the future following re-education or revolution (Fielding
and Moss 2011). It is understood as an historical struggle for the right to enjoy a good
life, an ethical existence and a liberated subjectivity, rather than as a system of
institutions or an institutionalised response to them (Fielding and Moss 2011: 42; Lummis
1996: 22, 112). For all of these reasons, the project of radical democracy is necessarily
anti-capitalist.
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A non-deterministic philosophy of the knowing, acting and feeling subject
Prefigurative politics are premised upon a generous faith in human potential; the
‘insistent affirmation of possibility’ (Dewey 1939, 1916). It presumes that ourselves and
our relationships, knowledges and histories are emergent and undetermined. Outcomes
of efforts are therefore not regarded as straightforward matters of failure or success, but
as moments of learning in longer journeys of becoming. Radical democracy is thus not
simply an unfinished project, but an unfinishable one: ‘we can never allow ourselves to
think that we are “done”, that we have identified all the sites, structures and processes of
oppression “out there” and, most crucially, “in here”, inside our own individual and group
identities’ (Day 2005).
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An appreciation for the radical potential of learning itself
If we presume that unfinished subjects are engaged in projects to expand their collective
possibilities and to diminish, resist or transgress their limitations, we need a theory of
knowledge which is itself undetermined, unpredictable, unquantifiable and wild, and
which embraces intellectual and social experimentation. The critical-experimental
attitude is therefore central to all theories of radical democracy (Dewey 1938, 1939;
Foucault). However, in order to maintain an ethos of experimentalism that is full of love
and inquisitive rather than violent and instrumental, it is also necessary to be receptive to
criticism, on the one hand, and to difference, otherness and the new in open-hearted,
open-minded and open-ended ways, on the other. Prefigurative epistemologies are
militantly humble and humbly experimental.
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Methodologies for resisting power and transforming social reality in everyday life
None of the above practices can be successfully undertaken as individual enterprises. A
politics of possibility must therefore construct durable social relationships that are rooted
in love, mutual trust, aid and solidarity. This requires an ethics of care and attentiveness
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to others; as well as an ethics of care for the self (what Gibson–Graham once called
‘revolutionary self-cultivation’).
The cliché promise of prefigurative politics is that it opens possibilities for ‘being the change
you want to see in the world’, but it is more plausible to argue that it creates possibilities to
practice attempting to be the change you want to see in the world (Lehr 2012). It is this
possibility that people who engage in such work say is most inspiring: the thrill of the new;
the expansion of transformative, revolutionary human creativity into the space of the political
itself. The time and space of utopia are simultaneously contracted and expanded here:
contracted, in that alternative futures become either present-in-practice or within imaginable
reach; expanded, in that the horizons of possibility are therefore opened into infinity. If
nothing else can be said for certain about such experiences, they are often exhilaratingly
joyous – or even experienced, according to Gavin Grindon, as ‘mythic moments of potent
affect’ (2007: 94). People who participate in radical democratic projects for any length of time
often speak affectionately about their experiences of individual autonomy; of forming
cooperative relationships with others; of belonging and being accepted; of novel
redistributions of time and space; of the thrill of self-governance; of liberation from
dominating concepts, habits, relationships, vocabularies and institutions; and of coming to
voice through collective caring and mutual aid.
Do we all have to be activists?
This hope, however, is fragile. As Simon Critchley points out, living in this way even from
time to time ‘requires subjective invention, imagination and endurance, not to mention
tenacity and cunning’. It is often accomplished through prosaic and ‘largely unthrilling work’,
and, given that it runs against the common sense of what democracy feels like, is often
considered weird. As one activist recently wrote,
‘The trap of the old world is hard to wriggle out of… and the escape is a learning
process. Humans learn by doing. When we were little children, we emulated the adult
world in our pretend play, joyfully doing the serious work of creativity and cognitive
development. Let’s reverse that process. Let’s “play real”, emulating the world we
want, until it grows and grows and becomes more real than the dead old world. This
kind of ‘play’, as those who are already so deeply committed to Occupy and social
change and activism already know, is damned hard work. We have to resist, first, the
cultural values so ingrained on our psyches—things like competition, and distrust of
strangers. We have to confront our own privilege, and the ways in which we are
oppressed, so that we can be ready to be open to the ways that those privileges and
oppressions intersect with the people we will be working with. We have to really listen
to one another, be ready for the long hard work of real dialogue, ready to value
disagreements as opportunities for new solutions. We must be ready to accept that
some of us are angry, or sad, or tired; and are going to be that way for a long time.
We must be there to listen, to offer care and to offer alternatives for support outside
the dominant system. We have to fight the anger and sadness and weariness by
making joy, with play; with art; with creativity; with action. With values that have
nothing to do with buying and selling and labor-for- pay’ (Lehr 2012).
If this is an accurate representation of the project, however, then who other than the most
committed activists – and perhaps the most privileged and powerful ones – could embrace
and sustain such a politics? Even for people who are deeply committed, this is not an easy
mode of existence; ‘there are substantial emotional costs in the very act of taking a resistive
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stance on an issue, particularly when one is opposing the dominant beliefs of society’
(Brown and Pickerill 2009: 152). Jim, an artist–educator who has been part of an activist
collective for more than two decades, suggests that such practices exercise a ‘weak muscle’
in individualised societies. Sometimes, people just want to live. He says:
‘I think that people can get tired of the experience of constant self-management; you
know, of trying to be flat, trying to negotiate everything with each other all the time.
That ain’t easy, and I think somebody will feel – actually, I don’t need to do that, I
want to just be in a hierarchy; give me a job and then I can get on with other things I
want to do. […] I can see why they would feel that.’
Such basic security may itself be a utopian fantasy for people living in precarious situations,
who may have demanding caring responsibilities, who suffer from psychological or emotional
pain, who live with the imminent threat of violence and indignity, or who must struggle for
their basic survival. As another activist observed, the most everyday projects in radical
democracy are often the most ‘slow-moving beasts’ because ‘people don’t have the money
[and are] dealing with injustice on a daily level’ (Dan 2012).
For many people, a deliberately radicalising ‘politics of possibility’ simply does not appear
possible at all – and it is often least so for those who are theorised as potentially radical
subjects. While it is thus important to undertake work that radicalises thinking, identity,
relationships and experience, it is also necessary to explore the economic, social and
affective conditions that make such work imaginable – not as everyday life, but from within it.
If new modes of political engagement are to be oriented towards ‘enabling experiments and
the emergence of new forms of subjectivity’, we need to understand the subjectivities,
relationships, spaces, epistemologies, knowledges, affects and languages that are
conducive to this project.
Do we need to become ‘radical subjects’?
The problem of the radical subject, or of a revolutionary subjectivity, is central to critical
theory.1 It is presumed that unless we can prove there is some ‘pre-theoretical resource for
emancipation’ to speak to, some potentially radicalised audience waiting to be spoken to,
critical theory degenerates into mere ideology (Honneth 2007: 64). Within this tradition, the
absence of a will to critique and the lack of desire to transcend one’s existing circumstances,
or the lack of appreciation for radical art and education, have been treated as pathologies –
damages from either the alienating and exploitative forces of capitalism or from the
dehumanising forces of authoritarian state and cultural power.
This is a ‘deficit model’ of political subjectivity, which creates a gap or a lack in human
possibility that various forms of education, art and action can be called upon to fill. If the gap
itself is not apparent to the people for whom it seems necessary, then the role of radical
pedagogy and of art – so it is argued – is to make it visible through some sort of creative
destruction, via the ‘breakdown of the interpretive scheme, the framework of intelligibility
through which an individual had hitherto made sense of herself’ (Kompridis 2006: 64). Such
moments are thought to create an intensified engagement with space and time in which we
are compelled to reflect critically on how we reproduce, reject or transform the cultural
practices that shape our world. In this reading, the transformative potential of such crisis
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emerges from the experience of being decentred in ways that we neither choose nor control;
with outcomes that are unpredictable, spontaneous and surprising. Feeling out of place,
uncomfortable, unrecognisable, or participating in activities that are seen as threatening to
sacred normalities can provoke a state of amplified reflexivity in which we realize that our
bodies, truths and ways of being do not fit the contours of a dominant reality and the reality
could be otherwise. But, as Lorraine Hansberry points out in, ‘the thing that makes you
exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely’ (1969, cited
in Hill Collins 1991: 268).
These references to agony, unbearable modes of existence, and loneliness alert us to the
possibility that the ‘pathologies’ which critical theorists have struggled so long against are not
pathological at all. The fear of the new, the uncertain, the uncomfortable and the unfamiliar
are not only explicable; moreover, ‘the desire to order chaos through simplified schemas, to
ward off the felt dangers of ambiguity, seems perhaps more “human” a characteristic than
any other’ (Boler 1999: 176). As John Dewey argued, ‘the live creature demands order in his
living but he also demands novelty.’ However, ‘the difficult becomes objectionable only when
instead of challenging energy it overwhelms and blocks it’ (Dewey 1932: 173). Intense
emotions of the sort that radical democracy not only accommodates but demands can
mobilise people or paralyse them; destabilise or maintain the status quo (Wilkinson 2009).
There is a thus need within critical political projects to prioritise the kinds of intellectual,
affective, relational and ethical labour that ground subjective and collective transformation.
Despite the ubiquity of ‘feelings of despair or personal fragility’ as a result of engaging in
critical cultural activities, this is seldom regarded as serious political or cultural work and, at
times, is systematically repressed.
When I think about the radical and its audiences, it is the loneliness that interests me. The
translation of theories into everyday life is problematic because the social and affective
foundations of radical possibility are situated, embodied, and distributed unequally
throughout society in the usual ways – and because the ideas themselves are political. The
ideal-type ‘crisis thinker’, for example, is that of an unattached, dissident intellectual;
implicitly masculine (though not necessarily a man), for whom it is possible and justifiable –
or even desirable and necessary – to live in contradiction to or with the desire to transcend
everything and everyone, and to make the existential suffering which emerges from this work
into an object for conceptual analysis or source of creative inspiration. One of the problems
with this account of ‘crisis thinking’ is that it conflates breaking through with breaking down.
One political artist I have spoken with was critical of the high visibility given to types of work
that aim primarily to ‘put depth charges’ under audiences in order to ‘wake them up’ – not
because there is no role for such work, which he suggests there is, but because they are not
sustainable for the artists, their audiences, or – interestingly – everyone else who has to live
with them.
My question is whether we can rethink these ideas; rethink the possibility and desirability of
radical experience, from the perspectives of people who, at the time of their engagement,
neither seek to dominate nor to be audiences for radical art or education or politics, who
can’t disengage from the capitalist everyday because others depend on them for survival
and this survival depends on existing – deeply imperfect and often highly damaging and
violent – institutions, who can’t break down because they haven’t enough emotional reserves
or intellectual energies for this to be transformative or to recover, who can’t break out in
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visible ways because doing so may place them in physically unviable situations, who want to
be able to act on their worlds and themselves and for others but who have no desire to
become activists.
From the ‘capitalist everyday’ to the ‘everyday world as problematic’
In theories of radical pedagogy, ‘radicality’ tends to be defined by its oppositional distance
from common sense and from practices of the ‘everyday’. The everyday is an undesirable
place: impoverished, mediated, maintained through false consciousness, complicit, private,
routine, filled with alienated and abstract labour, of the body, dominated by activities that
distract people from critical and creative matters. Kompridis has argued that many people
now live in the ‘capitalist everyday’, a particular construction of everyday life ‘whose rhythms
of work and consumption are dictated by the imperatives of money and power’ and which
‘actively erase the presence of the extraordinary within the ordinary, displacing it from the
everyday, turning it contrary to the everyday, and fixedly identifying the everyday with
sobriety, joyless sacrifice, and boredom’ (2006: 114).2 We live in everyday conditions where
radical being and action are often regarded as extreme, as asking fundamental questions
about power and possibility is increasingly regarded as abnormal and often risks
marginalisation or reprisal.
Kompridis’s definition, however, hints at the possibility that everyday life is not one thing. We
may live in many different ‘everydays’ everyday, the ‘capitalist everyday’ being one. In this
mode of being, we mistake extraordinary moments of possibility for ordinary happenings,
and fail to notice them one by one or in relation to one another. But is there not, at least
potentially, a radically democratic or a radically pedagogical everyday? There is enough
complexity in our time and space to play with making it otherwise in an infinitesimal number
of ways.3 When we don’t see everyday life and prevailing subjectivities only as spaces of
deficit or lack, we can understand them as spaces of possibility.
One of Kompridis’s objectives, therefore, is to challenge ‘elitist contempt for the everyday’
and to recover the everyday as a space and time where transformative forms of rationality
and cultural practices may come to be. He argues that ‘if…one thinks of everyday practices
as the primary sources of social intelligibility, one will naturally be very concerned about their
openness to meaning and possibility, and their ongoing disfiguration by homogenizing and
totalizing tendencies within them’. In short, he suggests that ‘the everyday must be
theoretically and practically reclaimed rather than taken for granted’ in order for radical
democratic politics to grow radical roots. Our practices must be in the world and of the world
in order to remake the world.
The politics of possibility in space and time
This is why making times and spaces for radical thinking, being, relating and acting
especially in what appear to be the most mundane of situations and particularly where time
and space for creative and critical work are denied, is a significant political act. If there is
work going on which can ‘actively erase the presence of the extraordinary within the
ordinary’, through the shaping of rhythms of life and spaces, then alternative kinds of work
can actively replace it (Kompridis 2006, p. 114). The creation of possibilities for thinking, for
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connecting, for creating new ideas and things, for critique, for cultivating experience that is
denied, matter. The creation of environments in which people can experience critical
encounters with difference, and practice being together differently over significant periods of
time in ways that strengthens their capacities for self-governance, matters. Learning to listen
and to understand where people think from and the conditions of their lives in order to learn
what ‘radicality’ means for them and what sorts of work might enlarge their possibilities,
matters. Broadening and deepening our own knowledge and skill in different modes of
radical thinking and practice matters. Learning how to expand spaces, times and networks of
radical thinking and action in our everyday relationships matters – and in some cases, is
more effective than learning how to attract audiences for radical work.
The question then becomes not about the relationship between ‘the radical’, as a discernible
kind of thing or state of being and its potential audiences. The kind of radical culture I am
thinking about often has no audience at all. The question is about learning where people are
working, or could be working, in radical ways that may be more possible with the help of
cultural work. We can undertake work which allows us to understand the places ‘where
displacement [from the status quo, from determination] is an ever-present possibility’
(Kompridis 2006, p. 160). Kompridis argues that philosophy (and we might extend this to
other practices) is therefore best placed not as a practice that does something to people or
that people encounter and undergo, but as work that responds critically and in intelligible
ways to experiences, problems, questions and struggles. As Kompridis points out, our lives
are prone to ‘epistemological crises’. Cultural practice may therefore also work to bridge the
gap between a present state or situation and future possibilities, both by making the latter
visible and thinkable and by enabling people to find ways of creating them in practice. ‘A
philosophy that could actually play an interpretive role’, he says, ‘would be truly
extraordinary’ (2006, p. 163).
Educating hope by seeing the ‘extraordinary ordinary’ in everyday life
One tool we have for conceptualising such work, particularly in the context of a political and
cultural atmosphere whose average temperature is hopelessness, is Ernst Bloch’s notion of
educating hope. According to Bloch, ‘expectation, hope [and] intention towards possibility
that has still not become…is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but,
concretely and correctly grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole’
(Bloch 1991: 7). Bloch finds this architecture of hope at increasing levels of consciousness
and complexity, including daydreams, different kinds of anticipatory consciousness, wishful
images such as those found in fairytales, constructions and models of alternative worlds,
and utopian images of redemption, revolution or home.4 It is not that we don’t aspire to
transcend our current circumstances, challenge hegemonic thinking, resist domination;
rather, that ‘everybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams’, some of which are what he calls
‘stale, enervating escapism’ and others of which are ‘provocative…not content just to accept
the bad which exists [and] does not accept renunciation’. The latter part, he says, ‘has
hoping at its core, and is teachable’ (1959, p. 3).
Bloch’s idea is imperfect. He undertook his study of the force of hope in everyday life before
the present ‘pedagogical turn’ in art and politics, before relational art had been
mainstreamed, before recent theorisations of radical democracy. All five of his practices of
hope are fixed in a materialist philosophy of cultural production; all begin from the
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assumption that products (dreams, images, models, figures) guide practice. We can
question all of these terms.
The importance of the model, however, is not in its substantive content. It is in the argument
that the roots of revolutionary thought can and must be sought in the materialities of
everyday life; that these are unlikely to radicalise unless they are cultivated (educated); that
one way of educating hope is to ‘venture beyond’ what is presently possible to extend this
horizon; and that this stretching requires a great deal more work than is visible in
appearances.
This resonates with my understanding of what some radical artists and educators aspire to
do based on the way they describe their work. When I have spoken to them about it, I have
asked them to reflect less on the end product or experience and more on the processes,
relationships and conditions through which exhibitions, workshops, pieces of work and public
performances were created.
People speak often about visibility, suggesting that making things visible is often a first step
towards opening conceptual space for understanding and action. Sometimes, the ‘invisible’
things are relationships or experiences, and are invisible because they are intangible or
immaterial, or exist only in the past or future. In other cases, they are silenced or censored,
as is the case for persecuted or policed minority groups, critical knowledges and oppositional
identities. Sometimes, they are working with things that are coming into being, but that do
not yet – and may never – exist in tangible form. And in some cases, the desire to make
things visible springs from attempts to understand complex situations that cannot be
represented or ‘grasped’ through cognitive reason and language.
The different practices that they use to do this all revolve around a single set of aspirations:
to unfix things, to move things, to enliven things that are thought to be fixed, immovable or
dead, and to ground or gather-in things that have become unmoored. The metaphors that
people use to express the essence of their work evoke this aim of movement.

They aspire to ‘put flesh and blood’ into ways of experiencing the world that has been
drained of life-force by the vampiric saturation of everyday life by abstract forms,
impersonal calculations and economic exchanges. This presumes the possibility of
revitalising sensitivity to self, others and environment through the telling of stories
that link reason and emotion, mind and body, knowledge and experience, self and
other.

They work to ‘rehydrate’ elements of experience that have been dried up like ‘instant
coffee’. This conjures up an image of being dehydrated rather than drained of a life
energy – perhaps only for a moment, but with the long-term effect of making it difficult
to remain unaware that you are dehydrated in the future.

They want to ‘inject’ an element into life that would catalyse movement. The hope
here is that this might have the effect of, essentially, creating an affect. This is an
alchemic theory of change, which assumes that the effects of experience are more
like magic than art.
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
They hope to ‘turn on a tap’ of knowledge and experience that has been shut off
through years of devaluation, repression or ridicule. With a twist or turn, we release
voices that have been devalued, ridiculed and repressed for years or generations.
Unlike being drained of blood or dehydrated, this is a theory of experience that is
pent up and blocked by cultural power, but that can be almost instantly released.

All of these differ from another metaphor used: cement; the idea that popular
education is a kind of ‘cement’ that binds people together in strong ways that will
enable them to survive difficult and painful struggles against big power in society:
corporations, the state, prejudice. This is not a theory of a vampiric or dehydrating
society, but of one that dilutes life energy, unmooring people from one another,
setting them afloat and making it difficult to cultivate the grounded ways of thinking
and being that might allow them to resist.
What ties these metaphors together is that they all refer in some way to dryness and fluidity;
of processes of lives flowing and interrupted. They are used when people speak about their
working relationships, their personal experiences, their relations with audiences and
students, the practices they try to develop and their relationships to institutions.
Such metaphors give us some indication of what cultural workers actually intend to do, and
why. The nature of cultural practice is defined in different ways, but in general people who
were interviewed invoked three types of activity:

generating and creating (experiences; space; potential for ‘things to happen’; new
feelings; new thoughts and understandings of self, others and the world;
conversations and dialogues; encounters where people are required to reflect, relate
or consider otherness; disruption; discomfort; conflict; crisis; ‘explosions’)

intensifying (reflection; awareness; imagination; experience; connections between
people and ideas; feelings; time and space)

connecting (people; parts of ourselves that have we experience as separate or that
have been compartmentalised, such as mind and body; parts of the world that we
may experience as separate, such as intimate life, creative work and political action;
evidence of relations of power; human beings that are divided by prejudice and
inequality; ‘the dots’ of institutional power relations; past, present and future; personal
life with social forces; storylines; generations)
There is a sense that these activities do not tend to be cultivated within the ordinary routines
and power structures of everyday life, but that they exist as permanent potentialities. There
are numerous examples of how particular political-economic, institutional and cultural
conditions not only discourage these activities, but for a variety of reasons make it difficult –
or, in the common sense of the term, radical – to engage in them. And there are numerous
examples of creative, pedagogical and political work that can recover them, transform them
and help us to educate them.
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R. Coles has criticised the habit of distinguishing between these ordinary forms of
extraordinary practices from other kinds of radicalism as unnecessary, because the
possibility of radical democracy itself relies on a much deeper and broader range of work
than is generally seen, and changes that aim to have effects beyond their immediate
environments must at some point become manifest. All of the practices mentioned above
share some fundamental characteristics with more explicitly radical art and education – to
disrupt sensibilities about what belongs together and what is divergent, to intensify emotions
and activate affects in ways that transform our experience of the world, to activate and
inspire the radical imagination, to break through the ‘crust’ of routine and to make possible
that which cannot now exist. But none requires an audience, none needs call itself radical,
and most would not be significant even to those who are watching. They do, however,
require being in situations with others, where pedagogical, creative and political work is
undertaken in response to particular needs and problematics. They constitute the heart of
the work of a range of people with whom I have worked in the popular arts, education and
grassroots politics. They are radical with a different temporality – working not in the time of
the rupture (although they may be engaged in the midst of crisis, struggle and
transformation), but with a kind of ‘wild patience’ (Coles 2012). ‘Politically, says Coles, ‘given
the relentless effort of hierarchical power to impede democratic sensibilities, judgement and
action by freezing horizons, I think we should pursue radical democratic politics through an
ecology of different modes that work on extant limits in markedly different ways’ (2012, p.
80). Educating hope in everyday life is not only one kind of practice, but an integral part of a
much larger ecology of practices which make a radical politics of possibility possible.
For example, Herbert Marcuse undertook a ‘life-long search for a revolutionary subjectivity, for a
sensibility that would revolt against the existing society and attempt to create a new one’ (Kellner
2002).
1
2
Others have described our contemporary working lives, in the minority world, as having shifted from
‘alienated’ labour to ‘abstract’ labour, in which market forces have such strong shaping power that
even self-governed labour is not ‘free’ or ‘conscious’ (Young and Schwartz 2012).
Kompridis argues that ‘rather than steering the phenomena and practices of world disclosure into a
sphere remote from everyday life, critical theorists need to conceive of everyday life and practice
differently’.
3
4
Against, perhaps, our various ‘apparatuses of hopelessness’… (David Graeber).
References
For a full list of texts cited in this paper, contact me at samsler@lincoln.ac.uk.
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