Everyday Utopias Quotes

“While the focus of this book is on the conceptual lines everyday utopias can generate, it also offers an account of recognition in some of its many different forms, for the book treats recognition as a relationship that cannot be assumed. Indeed it is the pervasive failure on the left, and specifically among critical academics, to recognize the conceptual life and promise of everyday utopias within the wider pursuit of a transformative politics, which drives this book.”
― Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

“Through the mediating work of four cultural formations—carnival, tasting, contact zones, and edgework (or risky play)—the chapter explores how the articulation of market play provides a tool for leveraging and for holding an audience; works to redefine markets as pleasurable, exploratory, nontrading spaces; and provides a playful structure through which neoliberal market relations can be parodied and critiqued.”
― Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

“Can we imagine (and perhaps even find) more radical forms of governmental touch—of a state, for instance, that feels and feels its way? Yet imagining a more sensitive form of governmental touch immediately comes up against the problematic of the state. Critical scholarship has long been wary of the proximity and intrusion that a touching-feeling state might engender, but does this mean states should be kept at a distance? Adopting a utopian attitude, can states touch differently?”
― Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces

“They are lines that move between external imaginings (mainstream and dissident), the conceptual imaginings of site participants as these were communicated through texts, speech, and other kinds of conscious enactment, and the ways concepts were practically manifested: how care and property, for instance, were done, as well as talked about.”
― Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces