Extra/Ordinary moments: Utopia, everyday life and the method of transduction

From the Paris Commune of 1871 to the ‘assembly movements’ of the past decade: what these movements and uprisings had in common is their investment in changing the everyday lives of their own participants. But critics argue that, precisely for this reason, they often failed to realise any structural change in the long term. This article proposes an approach to these revolutionary experiences that defies their assessment in instrumentalist terms such as ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Engaging with the work of Henri Lefebvre and with a number of contemporary queer/feminist theorists (Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey, Verónica Gago), this article seeks to theorise the extra/ordinary moment or experience, in which boundaries between the exceptional and the quotidian, the extraordinary and the everyday, are being transgressed. I will reconstruct and employ Lefebvre's method of ‘transduction’ to describe how such extra/ordinary moments can be shaped into a ‘virtual object’, which may continue to inform utopian politics in the present and future. When based on such transductive operations, utopia is neither purely a product of the imagination, nor a model that is deduced from theoretical insights, but an extrapolation of concrete experiences.