The Periodic Table of a Feasible Utopia

I’m not quite sure where the idea for the Periodic Table came from, but I put it down to lockdown madness. However, I know it had many elements. I first encountered it in an encyclopedia as a child. I remember the sheer design pleasure of its rows of coloured rectangles and its mysterious nomenclature. As a former chemistry student, I respect and wonder at its scientific and intellectual elegance. As a reader of Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, I saw with delight that the Table could be turned into such rich metaphorical territory, a grid of both electron structure and emotional structure.

Of course, there is no shortage of alternative periodic tables – scan the internet. You’ll find coffee, Yorkshire, swearing, some funny, some not, but Mendeleev deserves better. Something deeper? Something more surprising? I had been thinking about manifestos – artistic, poetic, political, and others – and wondered if, in an era of such shattered attention spans and fragmented consciousness, they might be too long, too textual, and too linear to survive. What, in the age of Instagram, would a manifesto for utopia look like? My answer, and there are a lot of others yet to be discovered, was The Periodic Table of a Feasible Utopia.

It lived its first life in pen and pencil in a sketchbook, then it went digital, then it was printed up on cardboard and hung for an afternoon on a vast wall that an arts project lent me. Later on, I was making posters, like the one you see Michael reviewing, and staging the Table in an empty shop in a rundown mall in the centre of Bristol.

We transformed the shop into a pharmacy called Utopian Chemistry and invited the public to explore the Periodic Table. If they stayed, we suggested to our visitors that we had no monopoly on wisdom. Was there an element in their vision of utopia that they would like to add? If they did, we made it up. We printed two postcards of the element, gave one to them as a gift, and placed the other one on the wall to create a second work of art: The People’s Periodic Table of a Feasible Utopia.

Visitors of the “Periodic Table of a Feasible Utopia” arts installation staged in a shopping mall in Bristol, UK, were invited to add their own suggestions to create a second “people’s” periodic table.

Michael Burawoy was very enthusiastic about the Periodic Table of a Feasible Utopia, viewing it as some graphic representation of Erik Olin Wright’s “real utopias”. I think Michael would have loved this interactive and popular version, especially the crazy, intimate, and off-kilter conversations with people about what the world could be like, often with folks who didn’t have the chance to have utopian thoughts as much as they would have liked. I think that probably goes for all of us.

David Goldblatt, independent sociologist and journalist, UK <tobaccoathletic@yahoo.co.uk>