Episode 6: “The proliferation I see everywhere”: Sophie Lewis on the praxis and theory of utopia and abolition

I think “the utopian’ for me is about a method of negation of falsely naturalized givens or, like, received frames of the natural, sort of saying simply— I mean, this is such a basic protest phrase, right? But another world is possible. I mean, it is it’s it’s it’s a sort of “no” to the given.

When we worry that thinking is lost without the university do we neglect the sustaining communities continuously created through the work of thinking for and with others? I am Lette Bragg and today on Many Academies, I talk with Sophie Lewis. He thinks about utopia and abolition outside the university, and his recent books include Enemy Feminism, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

We talk about how to make sense of and stay with what holds us. Our conversation traces connections between interdependent concepts Sophie has developed. I use the word tentacle a lot to name and sustain the utopian materiality of how we make each other. For some reason, I was really struck by a short piece Sophie wrote on Tom Hooper’s Cats called The Cats Defender has Logged On, and so that is where we begin.

[Laughs] Wow, great, great selections from a very long list of things I’ve put out there that’s, that that little reflection about the much detested musical adaptation of Cats, is, it’s a little known– it’s an obscure favorite, I think, for of people who read me. And I wrote it in the bath, on Christmas Day.

In the water?! That’s perfect!

That’s right, yeah. Right after seeing it with my brother and partner in an empty cinema on Christmas Day. [Laughter] I mean, it’s complex. I didn’t really think it was a particularly valuable artistic object as a film [Laughter], but I did want to say something about, yes, as you say to me, something rather startlingly obvious about the attraction at the heart of this and the the pleasurable, sensuous, sort of aesthetic and erotic horizon that Cats sort of holds, or that the affordance in Cats of a sort of glimpse into something utopic, sort of anti-work horizon.

I think the amount of time that many, many, many humans spend gazing at Cats has some kind of, you know, it’s about educating our desire to take relaxation and pleasure and rest and comfort and aesthetics, that seriously, right? As seriously as cats take these things… educating a desire to emulate certain aspects of cats, even as at the same time that they are kind of assholes, aren’t they? [Laughter] I mean, you know, there’s, and there’s a joke I wanted to make about how the whole thing about the musical Cats is that you couldn’t ever make a musical casting cats because have you ever met a cat? [Laughter] You know, it’s the antithesis of what you need, you know, to make a musical. You know, every musical is definitionally populated by dogs, you know? So that’s the joke that I felt, [laughter] team players, and eager, eager beavers. [Laughter] But, yeah, there’s, you know, there’s this kind of… yeah, there’s something kind of sensuous, anti-work… there’s a sort of mode of affinity between cats and T. S. Eliot’s poems that is, I think quite aspirational, right? It’s not got the sort of, the nationalism of dogs or something?

Yeah, that’s, that’s really, really funny and also really lovely. And like, as you’re talking, I’m like, seeing all the intersections of your work. And I remember you saying you’re always doing, like, one thing across all these different, like, mediums and formats and you kind of are, but it’s like a really complex thing. And so, I’m trying to decide like which tentacle to, to kind of touch on? And I think it’s the, this kind of facing just the way things are. Like, Like so, so if you imagine these two terms, like there’s “abolition” and then there’s “care networks,” right? And so very often when you name the thing you want to abolish, they’re they’re forms that some people would take as supportive or caring and nurturing. So abolish the family for example, right? And then you what you’re doing is you’re pulling up the way there’s actually like, there’s like a cross between those two things. And actually abolition is this way of holding fully, whereas the care networks we’ve established are often modes of undoing or destruction to some degree. And you’re leaning into that. So abolition and utopia is this way of moving past the limits of what we think we are offered by what we are given in order—and this these are your words, right?—to actualize it, right? To actualize the unrealized promise of what these are supposed to be giving us. Am I getting it right, in in kind of what you doing? Does it feel like it?

Yes! No, yes, that’s that’s it. It’s– sometimes I worry a little bit about the the way that I invoke Hegel… there is a sort of uncertainty I have about what I am committing to, what kind of baggage and what kinds of extra trappings. Because I haven’t got much attachment to Hegel at all and I know that some people—and this kind of concerns me and, and, and interests me sort of—ssee certain deployments, at least of dialectics, as a sort of mystical, woo-woo magic. And what I, what I think I say, at least for now to, to this is that I—and maybe I’m trying to cherry pick or have it sort of every which way—but I don’t think I’m committed to an entire sort of apparatus of dialectical reason in all ways.

What I find very interesting and true as a description of how change happens is the idea that abolition, in the sense of this strange concept of Aufhebung or positive supercession is that, it just seems true to me, almost like materially [laughs] rationally, you know, this feels very rational to me [Laughter] on some level rather than woo woo mystical, but perhaps we don’t want to oppose those two things either. But it seems to me that, yes, you know, when you get, you know, your hands collectively as a movement on a problem, you’re, you’re, you’re identifying… You know, as you say, everything’s tentacular and interconnected and [laughs] you know, in order to abolish one thing, you probably you’re going to have to abolish i.e. transform, you know, everything really.

But when it comes to a problem like the prison industrial complex, you know, you’re, you’re you’re you’re saying, that in order for the, this, this thing to truly, you know, go away, parts of it will also have to stay because the thing that has allowed it to exist has been its small element, the kernel within it, that has purchase on on real need. That’s always going to be, you know what, what keeps something around. You know, I mean, the police don’t serve people‘s needs for safety and security, they actually serve a completely different purpose, quite explicitly, right, in history. They they they, they’re part of a function, a commitment to deploying violence in service of class rule. But, because that resembles safety for some in the ruling class, it it also, it has become an image of safety for, for all. And it capitalizes on that real need, you know, we have a real need to feel, to feel safe. And so we’re sort of, you know, we’re held hostage in a way, by this giant apparatus that purports to be the only way we could meet that, that, that need. And, in order to actually change that, to actually change that historically in a real way, you know, we would have to build this, this series of things, or indeed the world that, that that really meets the, the human need for safety, in something closer to a universal way, at least.

And so perhaps I’m wrong to sort of invoke the entire baggage of Hegel and dialectics and so on. But, that seems to me to be super useful, right? Just just that “abolish” doesn’t mean destroy per se, it means destroy and transform and preserve and actualize. And I’ve just found that really helpful for understanding the stakes of what movements are trying to go about achieving

The beauty of the small precision. So getting closer to way, the way things are, it requires this, this sitting with, the sitting with the baggage, as you say, right? Sitting with the way things go could go wrong, sitting with this history, but it’s like, it’s necessary in terms of what we need, and just what our aims are, right? So, we need safety. This is like one of the things we have to sit with. So I’m– the next— there’s, oh, again, two tentacles are coming forward, and the one was the utopian uncertainty. So, “utopian.” You brought up the word “uncertainty” yourself, right? We’re never sure about the places where we’re turning, but it’s this uncertainty that’s, like, necessary for any thinking of utopia, right, any possibility. And then there’s this idea of, like, holding, holding water, amniotechnics, right? Where you’re trying to hold onto all the other risk, right, and also all the potential. So it’s this, like, vast, it’s this vast effort that is often also like, really small, like holding onto the smallness of something.

Gosh. You’ve actually, you’ve read so carefully what a, what an immense honor. It’s so gratifying. How lovely. I think you’re making remarks, connecting different things I’ve put out there that quite surprising, in the best possible way, and illuminating to me. And I think that’s what a writer needs like, like water, you know? Like, oh, dreams of, you know, having interlocutors, readers who can—I mean, this this sounds kind of egoic. It’s it’s actually kind of opening out onto other things, but I think what I wanted to say was sort of, like, explaining to you what you’ve actually said is a big part of my experience of of being a writer. And I mean, that actually kind of humbly, you know, so wonderful. Like, it’s not because it’s so great what I said, it’s just that I didn’t necessarily fully understand it, and so other people helped bring that into focus. It’s very sort of, I don’t know, it feels sort of anti-individual or trans-individual or something like that as a, as a process.

But yeah, this, this thing you mentioned, “amniotechnics,” it is a piece that I have kind of constantly been aware I would love to return to, or that perhaps it is also cropping up in unexpected ways, as you say, all the time. I wrote it actually ages ago, you know, in 2017 and then it became this final chapter of my, my book about, you know, the impossibility of surrogacy, or, you know, the the, the politics of gestational labor for surrogacy now and it remains sort of one of the things that the art world has taken up the most about whatever I’ve done, never, you know, it’s just been republished and anthologized so many times, this essay, amniotechnics. It’s it’s a complicated thought, I think, you know, that this this, this this term for holding and skillfully knowing when to release water and, protecting and defending against water, this technology, this is sort of simultaneously, you know, life giving and, and potentially fatal. Yeah. There’s something serious there, about the the already latent gestationality of what we do. And, yeah. And, and and I think another, another sort of element is this, kind of, this links to what you said about abolition as actualization, you know, there’s already necessarily interdependence and mutuality about all things to do with human beings, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And at the same time, the forms that we’ve got for, you know, honoring that interdependence and mutuality are, grossly sort of, gross insults to to that latent fact. And so there’s, there’s so much, more that, you know, it makes sense to call for interdependence and mutuality even though it’s already here in a sort of travesty form, you know. And something about amniotechnics is a bit like that. I think, you know, we’re already made of water and protecting water and protecting against water and yet so much more skill and awareness and attention needs to be brought to these matters.

Yes, no, that was lovely. I mean, I found it really beautiful, and it really gave me something, like a language to make sense of things that I’m trying to do. You know, this, this idea of holding, in both terms of, like, protecting and keeping, and knowing the difference between the two. And it then pushed me to think about maternity. When you write about maternity, when you have it there in the background, that’s what you’re thinking about, you’re, it’s, you… yeah, you’re confronting things the way they are again. Like, you’re leaning into the possible risk of using maternity as any court of theoretical leverage. But you kind of go you’re kind of confronting the matrixyl nature of any form of creation or any form of world making without sliding into reproduction. You know, the two are kind of close together and you’re, like, moving from one to the other, which is so hard to do… Yeah….

That’s so, so, so well phrased, thanks. That’s really insightful, I think, yeah. I think a lot of this kind of comes from an early encounter with, you know, Donna Haraway’s early writings, skepticism about the whole concept of reproduction, really, yu know, it’s like, “does that really happen?” You know, “does it does it happen in our species?” You know, you know, she says, it’s, it’s a very potent, sort of myth, very potent story, about what what is happening when we mother, and when we baby make, which is this difference, you know, different things, you know. But, even, you know, depends what level of abstraction you pick, but she could she could sort of take you on on any of them, really, when it comes to, you know, the question of DNA and genetics and the sort of the things we think go on when we smash together two sets of chromosomes, you know. It’s crtainly not, in any sense that we tend to believe in, reproductive. We are, not any of us, immortal in that sense, truly not, but perhaps there are other ways in which we continue, you know?

Actually, the way I said that just reminded me of… there’s a poem by Diane Di Prima that sort of ends with this incantatory sort of, almost like a prayer for different things to continue: may it continue. And it seems to me like there are very kind of non-reproductive, you know, urges and necessities and horizons for the continuation, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s queer regeneration as well, it’s, it’s… But we have to abandon the fantasy, I think of [laughs] reproduction, you know, I would almost say that, maybe. I don’t know if I’ve phrased it that way before, but it’s it’s clearly not… I think it does very bad things, you know, I think it’s at the root of many bad things, the idea of, the sort of reproductive.

It also seems to me really frustrating that Marxist feminism is is sort of seemingly, at least for now, kind of fated to work with that category. It seems like we, we have, production and social reproduction, and that seems to be, you know, how it is. I think I think everybody knows that these aren’t– that these are really problematic ways of making the incision, but it seems very difficult to get to get beyond— much like gender, you know, there’s always risk and and danger, to even talk about these matters because one is reinscribing them as one attempts to take them apart. But, yeah, I think there is a lot, about the stuff I’ve said about mothering against motherhood, you know, motherhood as a patriarchal institution, actually, as it used to be called by many in the 70s. But I think now when you say “patriarchal institution of motherhood,” people are like, “what?” But, there is yeah, I think it’s hard for people to hear it as genuinely not about gender. I think full surrogacy now is attempting to put aside the question of gender when talking about gestation and to show that it’s kind of possible. And, you know, sometimes I point out to people that I don’t really say women in full surrogacy now. [Laughs] It seems it seems really implausible that that would be the case, but I think I think it’s kind of— I don’t think it’s not in there at all, but it’s it’s not in there very much. It’s… and yet I think it is for many radical feminist thinkers who think of everything through, through, through, through women and women actually so satisfactorily addressing about matters, and so I think that was a sort of methodological impulse I had you know, to, to, to see if one can talk about gestating, waged and un waged, without, without making, everything, about gender because indeed, you know, gestating seems to not have an immovable gender at all. And, there’s and I mean, I believe that in general about most labor, or maybe all labor. And when I say mothering, I really do mean something that every everybody can do. But that goes against, people’s associations as, like, “mother is the most gendered word you could pick,” you know? “So why would you pick that word, Sophie?” You know. but I persist.

Shoot, what was I going ot say? Something about, I think, also, maybe the temporality of production and reproductive production as it’s relating to maternity, so it’s very often this linear progression, you know? Whereas if we think about we’re all always making each other, that is something that’s always in the present, it’s always the potential, it’s always a possibility, and that’s what we keep cutting out with these fantasies. So we have these fantasies of survival, of ways to keep going, but with the fantasies, they’re often, like, just taking away from the way things are. You know, we’re supposed to just be making each other, and so this is why I think, like, you’re, you’re speaking of utopias, but sometimes to me, it’s just very often just being the way we are, you know, it’s like, so real to me. Which is why I think the language means so, so much to me. The ability to just name the things the way they are is, like, revolutionary sometimes. Yeah. But, we can also end because this is been, like, a lot of work. We can end also on the collectives, which came up in, you know, my very first question about cats, you know, and you were describing, like, a collective, you know, these kind of unruly beings that are being brought together through desire, you know, or through pleasure. And they, they are, you know? And so, like, do you want tell me some of the collectives and communities that are forming for you around your work, and in your life, the way that you can think and study, talk about things?

Gosh, you are, I don’t mean to just flatter you, but you are very sharp. I’m having loads of new recognitions.

Oh, thank you!

And new questions… it’s such a such an honor, really, such a pleasure.

Oh, I’m so glad.

…to actually think about things that really matter to me, because you have put your finger on the things that really matter to me. [Laughter] And, you know, I– it’s like being shown what those things are, you know, and that in itself is really interesting because, the the road I’m on—or roads, I don’t know—is often about a slightly more alienated relation, maybe inevitably, to the sort of transmission of, of ideas.

I mean, I, I do gigs right, I’m a gig economy creature. I, I, I make my living outside of the academy through writing and a sort of contractor, short term teaching, sort of ungraded course series of things I offer at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, which is very nice, I get to sort of teach whatever I want. Anyone can sign up, by the way. I do courses on, very short ones, four weeks. It’s like Kathy Weeks, Shulamith Firestone, family abolition, children’s liberation. I did actually one on on the etiology of TERFism, right, “trans exclusionary radical feminism,” which I think is really important to sort of take seriously and go deep, deep into the, deep green Catholic esoteric origins of, and, all kinds of things like that. And then I give talks and I go to universities to be the diva who does a lecture, you know, I get paid for that, so I collect honoraria and that’s sort of how I am. And often conversations are not as deep as, as personal and oriented towards sort of a deep level of sort of praxis and, and, overarching meaning, or project as this, so thank you.

But, I yeah, the collectives in my life that have enabled and potentialized and held my sort of individual undertakings are, you know, difficult to enumerate or define quickly. But there are, you know, there are things that I believe get left out of conversations about the crisis of the humanities, the crisis of the university, which is the, the skillfulness and the proliferation I see everywhere of groups of people doing study and policy research and, grief, sort of, processing together, death doula-ing, you know, critique, attempts at accountability and, you know, yeah, on Discord, you know?

I just finished doing a children’s liberation course for, for Brooklyn Institute and that was it was actually really challenging. Partly because, you know, if you if you’re paying attention to something like a topic like children’s liberation, it’s going to, you know, blow up in your face if you organize it pedagogically as a, you know, as a thing that you an adult, are sort of teaching or imparting. So, you know, it’s really it’s really difficult and interesting and chewy, and challenging. And, there was a, you know, at least one, you know, self-described child in the in the course, which is also in the classroom on Zoom, which is something that Brooklyn Institute hasn’t really thought about the possibility of, you know, as a, as an institution, you know. And this self-described child, you know, who kept pointing out that we were saying, that people were saying “they” instead of “we” when it came to their constituency—children, people—was, yeah, was just sort of also showing and demonstrating and pointing out constantly what sorts of, sort of research her, networks, they are in that are sort of also oriented towards the sense of a future that does not include higher education, really, because of the quite rational assessment that there is not much to be hoped for there for many people, you know. Or, that it is actually sort of on a, on a crisis spiral of decline.

But then, you know, also sort of doing mutual aid and material resource gathering for people to be able to have more autonomy before they reach, you know, legal majority and there are sort of groups of people doing estrogen manufacture and distribution all over the, the U.S., you know, where we are, where I live, where… And through the sorts of quite basic kind of needs, needs meeting activity such as, yeah, giving safe—just as safe is as any other kind you could get, really—HRT, you know, hormones, to people for free. You then see that, a whole bunch of sort of subjectivity changes or that politics cannot help but happen, when you get those sorts of basic things out of the way, right? Like, and so the, the sorts of things that become possible when you realize, when you start to demystify and de– yeah. Delegitimize, I suppose, on some level, just through concrete knowledge, sharing and learning what it is that, you know, biomedical authority really has that’s different from what you could have by, by, you know, sorting certain things, testing things yourself, generating them, de-commodifying them.

That that that is enormously sort of fascinating as subjectivation process. It’s a bit like what I say at the end of this little Abolish the Family pamphlet I wrote where you realize that in an encampment, you know, a protest kitchen or something, people aren’t used to having things under their own control to the extent that, when they start having a taste of what it’s like to meet their needs outside of the state and outside of the market, the appetite grows collectively for more of that. And so there’s this kind of upward spiral, which I believe some quite, you know, long standing, like, 19th century theorists of utopia or so, were saying, I believe. There’s this sort of idea that the more people have, the more they collectively begin to realize they deserve. There’s a nice phrase from the welfare rights movements radical wing in the 80s in the U.S., where it’s, about hoping to make people rich in needs actually, as in needing more things, right? Which is counterintuitive because some leftist system about, I don’t know, recognizing that you don’t need a bunch of things really when it comes to consumer society, perhaps, you know.

But I really I really like this kind of almost you, utopic, utopian, turning of that austerity premise on its head. Like, communal luxury is not about, yes, sure, it’s not about like, whatever, nice iPhones for all. It is about recognizing the the sheer amount of of wealth, of relational wealth, you know, to which we are entitled, like, it’s our birthright, you know. And so, yeah, when you say the, you see a sort of “looking at things as they really are,” and you’re putting that intention in, in my, in my work, and you’re putting that intention, it’s this utopianism category I think that’s really smart and perceptive of you, because… And yes, you also brought up this risk, this this sense that we don’t know what we might make if we begin to attempt to abolish everything, the present state of things, as the phrase goes. But there is a sort of sensibility issue there where it’s like some people think we need to know a lot more before we even think about beginning to try, because what if it was much worse, right? What’s around the corner that we might potentially help bring into being? That that would be terrible if it was worse and it was us who brought it about. And I think that’s, you know, a serious concern, you know? I think there are worse things maybe then than capitalism and worse, worse things than, you know, the family has the technology for the care, for example.

Yeah. No, I completely yeah, no, I think I completely get that. And I also think that like, no real projects, like when you really trying to do something or make something, there can never be the sense of entitlement to the idea that it’s going to work out. I mean, it’s always this, like this terrible decision, you know? “What if I’m wrong and yet I have to try?” And you’re facing the potential failure as part of it, you know? The potentiality of no redemption and yet you have to try. I think that those three words that that you brought up twice, like, “abandoned the fantasy” is really powerful for me. Because we have fantasy, we do, like the fantasy, we hold on to it, we generate narratives to hold on to it. Whereas at some point it’s just about letting go.

I want to conclude by kind of bringing up this theme of hospitality, because you mentioned, like being held hostage by something earlier. And so I was immediately thinking of being a host and then of hospitality and of the self-described child that came into your class, like, unexpectedly and is now making, you know, we have to now question the nature of the classroom and the, the, the nature of the community and of the, the institutes. And that’s a kind of hospitality to let in what could potentially mess everything up is like, I think, lovely.

Very well put. Yeah. There, there, I was I was lucky to be invited into a project, the curator, because Sylvie Facton was doing about the concept of hospitality. And I think there are people, insisting and and wrestling with the fact that this world is actually very messy and unromantic and full of antagonism, and full of problems.

Like mothering.

No, yeah, exactly, like mothering, that’s right, yes. Xeno-hospitality, you know, to say that, yeah, to say that, you know, playing, acting, enacting hospitality, being host to a fetus, is a sort of form of bodily generosity, you know, as theorists have often termed. It is, yeah, it is not to say that it is, somehow nonviolent, you know, there’s actually lots of, actually a lot of violence in this relationship. And that’s, and I think people hear me— It makes me actually, one of the things that I think is saddest, that makes me saddest is when people, and it doesn’t happen that often, thank goodness, but sometimes people think from the opening pages of Full Surrogacy Now because I, you know, I open with the phrase, It is a wonder we let fetuses inside us, right? And then and then there’s engagement with an evolutionary biologist who is pushing back against romanticized notions of the traffic across the placenta, in order to say it is, you know, quite a grisly business. And the placenta actually shields and protects the gestat, gestator, right from from fetal cells, because that’s necessary if you don’t want to be, you know, eaten alive, actually, it’s like… I mean, this is just pragmatic. I— what more makes me sad is when people read this and think that I’m saying something like, “and therefore, you know, this is bad and we should never want to do it and never do it and seek to automate it, obviously for everybody,” you know. I am actually interested in possibilities around exogenous, I’m interested in that, right. But I, I’m on the, I should, I would really hope it’s very obvious that I think gestating is incredible, right. Like I’m so fascinated and full awe, I don’t I mean that, I mean, I mean wonder in the sense of wonder. It it is a wonder that we let fetuses inside us, you know, parentheses complimentary, right, not derogatory, as the kids say. I just think it needs to be, you know, in order to really understand what we’re dealing with here, we need to know that these, cells that grow not completely dissimilar from the way that cancer grows and that someone who is making a baby is literally dealing with that! Damn! You know, let’s give some, let’s put some respect on that!

Thank you Sophie Lewis, for coming onto Many Academies. We will keep an eye out for your forthcoming book on children’s liberation. Thank you Jodi Reddick’s for your art and Sebastian Bauer for your music, and Nina Zhuo for your transcripts. Thank you Aydelotte Foundation for your support. Thank you for listening.