Our present is marked by multiple failures: of governance; of care; of hope. Amidst the wreckage, we see numerous attempts – real and imagined – to keep hope alive by dreaming of a better future. Such utopian exhortations are fuelled by the idea that it is not too late – we still have time to correct our failures. This secures a particular futurity for failure: we speculate on a utopian tomorrow to counteract the pressing failures of today, and we implement lessons today to course correct for a better future. We argue that it is already too late for such social dreaming. We turn instead to the uneven potentialities of the current ‘failure-scene’ through accounts of non-redemptive failure that refuse the normative coordinates of hope; flatten the elongated present of the ruins; endure the event-oriented temporality of crisis thinking; and improvise with whatever tools and energies are available to us.
Coward et al. (2025) studied this question.