The Europeana Creative challenges aim to identify, incubate and spin off into the commercial sector viable online applications based on the re-use of digital cultural heritage content accessible via Europeana.
The best five applications will be invited to a final challenge event to pitch their ideas to representatives from the cultural and creative industries as well as to investors. The winner of a category will receive a hands-on Incubation Support Package provided by the project consortium to bring his/her product successfully to the market.The first round of the challenge covers history and natural history.
Deadline for applications is 14 April with a challenge event in Brussels on 29 April.
More info can be found at http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-creative/challenges
Thursday, 10 April 2014
Monday, 7 April 2014
Utopia Against the World - 26 March 2014
This workshop, Utopia Against the World: Spatial Resistance, Spatial Alternatives, was sponsored by the Centre for Advanced Studies, the Centre for
the Study of Social and Global Justice and the School of Geography at
the University of Nottingham.
The event opened by outlining some of the perennial problems for the study of utopia. These included the superficial contradiction that the most anti-utopian position can also be the most utopian, the problem of utopian perfectibility and the thinking around a post-future re-imagination of utopia.
The panel '(Science) Fiction, Utopia and Terror' had presentations from Emma Segar (Edge Hill University) with 'Trouble in Paradise: The Problems with Writing Utopian Fiction' and Judie Newman, (University of Nottingham) with 'Utopia and Guantánamo: Amy Waldman “Freedom”'.
Judie Newman gave an overview of Amy Waldman's short story - well meaning despot in charge, inhabitants are highly institutionalised, any question recalls interrogation. This 'utopia' is run by a colonial despot character; everything is perfect but people still feel miserable (as long a freedom looks happy, it doesn't have to be happy). Ultimately, anti-utopian consequences arise from the inhabitants flexing their freedoms - order turns out to be easier to enforce than happiness.
Emma spoke about her PhD project, which is an attempt to avoid the finality utopia potentially imposes. Using the blog fiction form, 'Bad Influence' develops a series of narratives based on utopian/dystopian themes.
Quiz - 'which utopia are you building?': http://badinfluences.org.uk/take-part/which-utopia-are-you-building/
Intentional communities: starting with a dream, leading to a plan, leading to the creation of spaces. Utopia can only exist in space temporarily: mapping, building, community living (Sargisson).
Dan Hancox - 'Marinaleda: Spain's Communist Utopia' Drawing on his recently published book The Village Against the World, this talk discusses life in the Spanish village of Marinaleda - the self-declared 'communist utopia'.
The event opened by outlining some of the perennial problems for the study of utopia. These included the superficial contradiction that the most anti-utopian position can also be the most utopian, the problem of utopian perfectibility and the thinking around a post-future re-imagination of utopia.
The panel '(Science) Fiction, Utopia and Terror' had presentations from Emma Segar (Edge Hill University) with 'Trouble in Paradise: The Problems with Writing Utopian Fiction' and Judie Newman, (University of Nottingham) with 'Utopia and Guantánamo: Amy Waldman “Freedom”'.
JN
Judie Newman gave an overview of Amy Waldman's short story - well meaning despot in charge, inhabitants are highly institutionalised, any question recalls interrogation. This 'utopia' is run by a colonial despot character; everything is perfect but people still feel miserable (as long a freedom looks happy, it doesn't have to be happy). Ultimately, anti-utopian consequences arise from the inhabitants flexing their freedoms - order turns out to be easier to enforce than happiness.
The story is described as a kind of post-colonial parable - freedom cannot be granted, only won. Utopia not the creation of place but impulse enacted in engagement with power.
ES
Emma spoke about her PhD project, which is an attempt to avoid the finality utopia potentially imposes. Using the blog fiction form, 'Bad Influence' develops a series of narratives based on utopian/dystopian themes.
Quiz - 'which utopia are you building?': http://badinfluences.org.uk/take-part/which-utopia-are-you-building/
General Observations
There is no evidence for the theory that utopia is specific to the Christian tradition - to the contrary, there are Chinese, Japanese and Islamic utopian traditions.
Intentional communities: starting with a dream, leading to a plan, leading to the creation of spaces. Utopia can only exist in space temporarily: mapping, building, community living (Sargisson).
Dan Hancox - 'Marinaleda: Spain's Communist Utopia' Drawing on his recently published book The Village Against the World, this talk discusses life in the Spanish village of Marinaleda - the self-declared 'communist utopia'.
Launch of Europeana Labs
Europeana has just launched a beta site called Europeana Labs, a new initiative designed to inspire, inform and support those looking to use the Europeana platform.
There are showcases for the Data and existing Apps, a new Blog and Events diary, and clearer ways to seek support (whether it's online or in real-world Locations across Europe). This is all backed up by enhanced API documentation.
For more info visit: http://labs.europeana.eu/blog/welcome-to-the-new-europeana-labs/
There are showcases for the Data and existing Apps, a new Blog and Events diary, and clearer ways to seek support (whether it's online or in real-world Locations across Europe). This is all backed up by enhanced API documentation.
For more info visit: http://labs.europeana.eu/blog/welcome-to-the-new-europeana-labs/
Sunday, 6 April 2014
The Performance of Digital Objects
Silke Arnold-de Simine has observed a tendency in ‘modes of performing and communicating the past [to] also create and shape memories’ (Silke Arnold-de Simine, ‘Memory Cultures: The Imperial War Museum North and W.G. Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction’, in Bombs Away!: Representing the Air War Over Europe and Japan, Volume 60, ed. by Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 296).
What could be called the digital mode of communication has, on one model, likewise been conceived as a performance. For example, Andrew Wilson in 'Significant Properties Report' (http://www.significantproperties.org.uk/wp22_significant_properties.pdf), writes:
‘The ‘performance model’ characterises a digital record as the result of a mediation of technology and data. The data source (record, object, etc) needs to interact with a process in order to be understood by a user. That process is a combination of hardware (computer) and software (application + operating system). Without this mediation the digital object is meaningless since the data that makes it up exists independently only as a stream of bits, completely incomprehensible to the majority of humans. The NAA conceptualisation views the result of the combination of source and process as a performance, since it is created anew every time the record (or object) is viewed by a user. As the NAA document says, “A source may be mediated by many different software platforms, and each combination of source and specific process platform may produce a slightly different performance”. What is rendered to a screen or printer, or any other output device, is the performance created when data and process interact. What this conceptualisation of digital object shows is that “neither the source nor the process need be retained in their original state for a future performance to be considered authentic. As long as the essential parts of the performance can be replicated over time, the source and process can be replaced”’.
See also: Euan Cochrane - 'Rendering Matters: Report on the results of research into digital object rendering':
http://archives.govt.nz/sites/default/files/Rendering_Matters.pdf
What could be called the digital mode of communication has, on one model, likewise been conceived as a performance. For example, Andrew Wilson in 'Significant Properties Report' (http://www.significantproperties.org.uk/wp22_significant_properties.pdf), writes:
‘The ‘performance model’ characterises a digital record as the result of a mediation of technology and data. The data source (record, object, etc) needs to interact with a process in order to be understood by a user. That process is a combination of hardware (computer) and software (application + operating system). Without this mediation the digital object is meaningless since the data that makes it up exists independently only as a stream of bits, completely incomprehensible to the majority of humans. The NAA conceptualisation views the result of the combination of source and process as a performance, since it is created anew every time the record (or object) is viewed by a user. As the NAA document says, “A source may be mediated by many different software platforms, and each combination of source and specific process platform may produce a slightly different performance”. What is rendered to a screen or printer, or any other output device, is the performance created when data and process interact. What this conceptualisation of digital object shows is that “neither the source nor the process need be retained in their original state for a future performance to be considered authentic. As long as the essential parts of the performance can be replicated over time, the source and process can be replaced”’.
See also: Euan Cochrane - 'Rendering Matters: Report on the results of research into digital object rendering':
http://archives.govt.nz/sites/default/files/Rendering_Matters.pdf
Saturday, 5 April 2014
Twilight Memories - Andreas Huyssen (P. 2)
From Memories of Utopia
“In our century the discourse of the end of the end of utopia is as endemic to the utopian imagination as its visions of other worlds, other times, or other states of mind” (p. 85).
Huyssen links Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse with utopia.
[Mannheim] “It is possible, therefore, that in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideological and utopian elements” (p. 85).
“No utopia ever dies alone. It takes its counter-utopia with it. With the demise of the Soviet Union, capitalism itself now lacks a vision of the future, but rather than trying to remedy the problem, it revels in that lack, as if short-term pragmatism were an alternative. The end of utopia, it seems, is our problem as well in a much deeper sense than we would like to admit” (p. 86).
Habermas analysed the phenomenon of a waning of confidence in technological solutions to social problems, suggesting “that at stake was not the exhaustion of utopian energies per se, but rather the end of a certain kind of utopian discourse which, since the late eighteenth century, had cristillized (sic) around the liberating potential of labor and production” (p. 87).
“More important for my concerns here […] is Habermas’s rejection of the notion of a radical rupture and his insistence on the coupling of historical and utopian thought, which, as Koselleck has shown in his work on the temporalization of utopia, first emerged on a major scale in the late eighteenth century, is by no means obsolete today. Utopia and time, utopia and history: History as a narrative of emancipation and liberation always points towards some future, the Blochian not-yet” (p. 87).
Adorno: the dialectic of remembrance and future projection as sine qua non of modern utopian thought?
“In this search for history, the exploration of the no-places, the exclusions, the blind spots on the maps of the past is often invested with utopian energies very much oriented toward the future” (p. 88).
“Nostalgia […] is not always the opposite of utopia, but, as a form of memory, always implicated, even productive in it” (ideology of modernization that has given nostalgia a bad name) (p. 88).
Huyssen wants to understand the “critical displacement of an earlier set of utopian energies” (the transformation of utopianism), rather than positing the exhaustion of the utopian impulse (see p. 89).
Sometimes (particularly in poststructuralist thinking) utopia becomes a casualty of the war waged on modernity and the master-narratives of the Enlightenment (see, e.g., Kristeva, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida etc.)
“Only if one collapses all difference between the utopian imagination at the core of the enlightenment and the historical miscarriages perpetrated in the name of rationality, democracy and freedom, would the poststructuralist critique of utopia have a point” (p. 89) – see frontiers to be colonised.
“If the dialectic between a given reality and the desire for imagined other worlds is constitutive for utopian thought, then the appearance of reality itself as u-topia, as simulacrum on the screen implies the actual disappearance of reality as we thought we knew it” (p. 91).
The failure of utopia to embody plenitude (in life, text or transcendence) can explain the turn to history and memory.
Utopia’s “other life was always opposed to an everyday present that seemed mired in oppressive traditional values, in pain and prejudice, and in reification on every level. When this present itself, however, has become progressively unmoored from tradition, when media saturation wipes out spatial and temporal difference, by making every place, every time available to instant replay, then the turn to history and memory can also be read as an attempt to find a new mooring. The reliance on memory in the social sphere marks the desire to resist the delimiting of subjectivity and the disintegration of social cohesion” (p. 100).
Memory as community, collective, society
Memory as technology, storage, information
“In our century the discourse of the end of the end of utopia is as endemic to the utopian imagination as its visions of other worlds, other times, or other states of mind” (p. 85).
Huyssen links Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse with utopia.
[Mannheim] “It is possible, therefore, that in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideological and utopian elements” (p. 85).
“No utopia ever dies alone. It takes its counter-utopia with it. With the demise of the Soviet Union, capitalism itself now lacks a vision of the future, but rather than trying to remedy the problem, it revels in that lack, as if short-term pragmatism were an alternative. The end of utopia, it seems, is our problem as well in a much deeper sense than we would like to admit” (p. 86).
Habermas analysed the phenomenon of a waning of confidence in technological solutions to social problems, suggesting “that at stake was not the exhaustion of utopian energies per se, but rather the end of a certain kind of utopian discourse which, since the late eighteenth century, had cristillized (sic) around the liberating potential of labor and production” (p. 87).
“More important for my concerns here […] is Habermas’s rejection of the notion of a radical rupture and his insistence on the coupling of historical and utopian thought, which, as Koselleck has shown in his work on the temporalization of utopia, first emerged on a major scale in the late eighteenth century, is by no means obsolete today. Utopia and time, utopia and history: History as a narrative of emancipation and liberation always points towards some future, the Blochian not-yet” (p. 87).
Adorno: the dialectic of remembrance and future projection as sine qua non of modern utopian thought?
“In this search for history, the exploration of the no-places, the exclusions, the blind spots on the maps of the past is often invested with utopian energies very much oriented toward the future” (p. 88).
“Nostalgia […] is not always the opposite of utopia, but, as a form of memory, always implicated, even productive in it” (ideology of modernization that has given nostalgia a bad name) (p. 88).
Huyssen wants to understand the “critical displacement of an earlier set of utopian energies” (the transformation of utopianism), rather than positing the exhaustion of the utopian impulse (see p. 89).
Sometimes (particularly in poststructuralist thinking) utopia becomes a casualty of the war waged on modernity and the master-narratives of the Enlightenment (see, e.g., Kristeva, Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida etc.)
“Only if one collapses all difference between the utopian imagination at the core of the enlightenment and the historical miscarriages perpetrated in the name of rationality, democracy and freedom, would the poststructuralist critique of utopia have a point” (p. 89) – see frontiers to be colonised.
“If the dialectic between a given reality and the desire for imagined other worlds is constitutive for utopian thought, then the appearance of reality itself as u-topia, as simulacrum on the screen implies the actual disappearance of reality as we thought we knew it” (p. 91).
The failure of utopia to embody plenitude (in life, text or transcendence) can explain the turn to history and memory.
Utopia’s “other life was always opposed to an everyday present that seemed mired in oppressive traditional values, in pain and prejudice, and in reification on every level. When this present itself, however, has become progressively unmoored from tradition, when media saturation wipes out spatial and temporal difference, by making every place, every time available to instant replay, then the turn to history and memory can also be read as an attempt to find a new mooring. The reliance on memory in the social sphere marks the desire to resist the delimiting of subjectivity and the disintegration of social cohesion” (p. 100).
Memory as community, collective, society
Memory as technology, storage, information
Friday, 4 April 2014
Utopia Again
This post summarises the position on utopianism developed by Lucy Sargisson in Fool's Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century.
Discontent with the current situation (critical, oppositional)
Following Tom Moylan, utopias always contain criticisms of their present [...] Its function is oppositional: it opposes affirmative culture and negates the contradictions of a social system by forging visions of what is not yet realised either in theory or in practice. The critical utopia does not blueprint, but rather it privileges social change in process
Because all utopia have all engaged contemporary debates, they offer a window into the political thought of their time and can e used as hermeneutic or interpretive (social or written) texts. And in order to fully understand any given utopian text (fiction theory or experiment), it is necessary to know soething about its social, economic and intellectual context (see pp. 10-12).
As well as challenging reality, utopias increasingly play with the notion of utopia, disrupting it, stretching it and creating something new from its remains (see p. 16).
Imagining Alternatives
Fictional (and theoretical) utopias all stretch ideas and concepts and place them in an alternative context. Ruth Levitas calls this the 'imaginary reconstitution of society'. This permits utopias to have heuristic function (see p. 13).
Totality vs. fragmentation
Early twenty-first century utopias are often shifting (between good to bad), multiple or fragmented visions of a world open to potential (see p. 13)
[Jameson] "Utopia is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place. It is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and of the very process of construction as such" (2005, p. 217).
Barbara Goodwin identifies the total vision as one of utopia's great strengths, in opposition to liberal "trial-and-error political empiricism". She says: "In general, utopias enrich our understanding of ideal social organisation and operation, by contrast with the more partial schematic views proffered by political theory" (allows us to think about how one part of life impacts on another) (see p. 14).
For a multitude of reasons we are living in an age in which authors and practitioners are wary of depicting total visions, complete utopias, or absolute fixes to the world's problems (see p. 14).
Not seeking perfection
Normative claim: utopias should not seek to create a perfect world (see, e.g. More's Utopia)
[Lyman Tower Sargent] "It is not utopianism that is at fault, the problem arises rather from the conviction that a particular utopia can bring about the only correct way to live" (see p. 15).
(Un)realisability
Sargisson does not consider realization or realizability to be a defining feature of utopia [...] Many utopias exist as thought experiments not blueprints or maps to the good life (see p. 15).
Process (function), not representation (form, content)
Bloch (followed by Levitas and Sargent) develops an idea f utopianism as a human impulse, driven by wishful thinking that can be found inside a huge range of different activities [...] Other scholars (e.g. Krishnan Kumar and Colin Davis) distinguish between utopias and other forms of ideal society. For them utopias are always and only fictions, containing generic conventions (see p. 15).
Sargisson's approach to utopianism privileges its functions (see Levitas, Concept of Utopia, p. 6), usually an approach shared by commentators who are themselves politically engaged (see p. 20).
Transgressive utopianism has three interconnected impacts. Utopianism operates on and across many different kinds of boundaries, including disciplinary boundaries, conceptual boundaries and the boundaries that structure thought and behaviour. First, it steps over boundaries that order and separate. Secondly, this renders the boundaries meaningless and/or emphasizes their porosity. Thirdly, this act of crossing borders and them to be porous creates a space where previously there was none. In this space, new and different ways of relating to the world can be practised. These spaces are conceptual and also lived. And this gives utopianism profoundly creative and heuristic functions (see p. 21).
Significant literary conventions for thinking about utopia more broadly
Estrangement: Involves distance, loss and strangeness and often evokes a negative relationship. It is an ambivalent and complex concept that lies at the heart of utopianism. The once familiar become strange, it always keeps one foot in reality (see p. 18).
[Suvin] "Utopia is a verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis" (see p. 19).
Estrangement is sometimes explained as an internal mechanism and form of utopian texts (see p. 20).
Anti-anti-utopianism
[Zizek] “30-40 years ago we were still debating about what the future will be – communist, fascist, capitalist – whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues; we all accept silently that global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with catastrophes […] It is much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism” (see pp. 31-2).
[Zizek] “Utopia is a matter of innermost urgency, something we are pushed into as a matter of survival when it is no longer possible to go on within the parameters of the ‘possible’” (see p. 32).
[Zizek] “The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way of resolving within the coordinates of the possible that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space” (necessary utopias) (see p. 32).
In Zizek’s version of utopianism, future happiness casts a bright shadow over present hardship: ‘we are already free while we are fighting for freedom, we are already happy while we are fighting for happiness’. This could be described as a prefigurative utopianism (see p. 36).
Sargisson focuses, within Archaeologies of the Future, on Jameson’s analysis of dominant prevalent historical (and contemporary) attitudes towards utopianism (which are variously anti-utopian), his analysis of the functions and limits of utopianism, and his claims about the value of utopianism (notwithstanding its limits) – she calls this an approach to utopianism “for our times” (see p. 37).
[Jameson] “Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systematic nature of the social totality” (Jameson, 2005, xii).
For Jameson, imagining alternatives is the task of utopias but alternatives can never really be imagined (see p. 38).
This is the limit and the tragedy of utopianism. Jameson’s belief in the necessary failure of utopianism stems from the Marxist methodological framework within which he works, which informs his materialism and his dialecticism. An epistemological materialist, he refers approvingly to ‘the empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses’ (xiii).
And he works with a conviction that a ‘fundamental dialectic’ drives utopian thought. This is a dialectic between identity and difference (see p. 39).
Utopias will always fail, then. They need to. They are no places. But they are important because they function to show us that radical thinking needs to be attempted; they deny that there are no alternatives (see p. 39)
N.B. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, power and capital have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few transnational corporations, some of which 'own' nation states.
Discontent with the current situation (critical, oppositional)
Following Tom Moylan, utopias always contain criticisms of their present [...] Its function is oppositional: it opposes affirmative culture and negates the contradictions of a social system by forging visions of what is not yet realised either in theory or in practice. The critical utopia does not blueprint, but rather it privileges social change in process
Because all utopia have all engaged contemporary debates, they offer a window into the political thought of their time and can e used as hermeneutic or interpretive (social or written) texts. And in order to fully understand any given utopian text (fiction theory or experiment), it is necessary to know soething about its social, economic and intellectual context (see pp. 10-12).
As well as challenging reality, utopias increasingly play with the notion of utopia, disrupting it, stretching it and creating something new from its remains (see p. 16).
Imagining Alternatives
Fictional (and theoretical) utopias all stretch ideas and concepts and place them in an alternative context. Ruth Levitas calls this the 'imaginary reconstitution of society'. This permits utopias to have heuristic function (see p. 13).
Totality vs. fragmentation
Early twenty-first century utopias are often shifting (between good to bad), multiple or fragmented visions of a world open to potential (see p. 13)
[Jameson] "Utopia is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place. It is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and of the very process of construction as such" (2005, p. 217).
Barbara Goodwin identifies the total vision as one of utopia's great strengths, in opposition to liberal "trial-and-error political empiricism". She says: "In general, utopias enrich our understanding of ideal social organisation and operation, by contrast with the more partial schematic views proffered by political theory" (allows us to think about how one part of life impacts on another) (see p. 14).
For a multitude of reasons we are living in an age in which authors and practitioners are wary of depicting total visions, complete utopias, or absolute fixes to the world's problems (see p. 14).
Not seeking perfection
Normative claim: utopias should not seek to create a perfect world (see, e.g. More's Utopia)
[Lyman Tower Sargent] "It is not utopianism that is at fault, the problem arises rather from the conviction that a particular utopia can bring about the only correct way to live" (see p. 15).
(Un)realisability
Sargisson does not consider realization or realizability to be a defining feature of utopia [...] Many utopias exist as thought experiments not blueprints or maps to the good life (see p. 15).
Process (function), not representation (form, content)
Bloch (followed by Levitas and Sargent) develops an idea f utopianism as a human impulse, driven by wishful thinking that can be found inside a huge range of different activities [...] Other scholars (e.g. Krishnan Kumar and Colin Davis) distinguish between utopias and other forms of ideal society. For them utopias are always and only fictions, containing generic conventions (see p. 15).
Sargisson's approach to utopianism privileges its functions (see Levitas, Concept of Utopia, p. 6), usually an approach shared by commentators who are themselves politically engaged (see p. 20).
Transgressive utopianism has three interconnected impacts. Utopianism operates on and across many different kinds of boundaries, including disciplinary boundaries, conceptual boundaries and the boundaries that structure thought and behaviour. First, it steps over boundaries that order and separate. Secondly, this renders the boundaries meaningless and/or emphasizes their porosity. Thirdly, this act of crossing borders and them to be porous creates a space where previously there was none. In this space, new and different ways of relating to the world can be practised. These spaces are conceptual and also lived. And this gives utopianism profoundly creative and heuristic functions (see p. 21).
Significant literary conventions for thinking about utopia more broadly
Estrangement: Involves distance, loss and strangeness and often evokes a negative relationship. It is an ambivalent and complex concept that lies at the heart of utopianism. The once familiar become strange, it always keeps one foot in reality (see p. 18).
[Suvin] "Utopia is a verbal construction of a particular quasi-human community where socio-political institutions, norms and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle being based on estrangement arising out of an alternative historical hypothesis" (see p. 19).
Estrangement is sometimes explained as an internal mechanism and form of utopian texts (see p. 20).
Anti-anti-utopianism
[Zizek] “30-40 years ago we were still debating about what the future will be – communist, fascist, capitalist – whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues; we all accept silently that global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with catastrophes […] It is much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism” (see pp. 31-2).
[Zizek] “Utopia is a matter of innermost urgency, something we are pushed into as a matter of survival when it is no longer possible to go on within the parameters of the ‘possible’” (see p. 32).
[Zizek] “The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way of resolving within the coordinates of the possible that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space” (necessary utopias) (see p. 32).
In Zizek’s version of utopianism, future happiness casts a bright shadow over present hardship: ‘we are already free while we are fighting for freedom, we are already happy while we are fighting for happiness’. This could be described as a prefigurative utopianism (see p. 36).
Sargisson focuses, within Archaeologies of the Future, on Jameson’s analysis of dominant prevalent historical (and contemporary) attitudes towards utopianism (which are variously anti-utopian), his analysis of the functions and limits of utopianism, and his claims about the value of utopianism (notwithstanding its limits) – she calls this an approach to utopianism “for our times” (see p. 37).
[Jameson] “Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systematic nature of the social totality” (Jameson, 2005, xii).
For Jameson, imagining alternatives is the task of utopias but alternatives can never really be imagined (see p. 38).
This is the limit and the tragedy of utopianism. Jameson’s belief in the necessary failure of utopianism stems from the Marxist methodological framework within which he works, which informs his materialism and his dialecticism. An epistemological materialist, he refers approvingly to ‘the empiricist maxim, nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses’ (xiii).
And he works with a conviction that a ‘fundamental dialectic’ drives utopian thought. This is a dialectic between identity and difference (see p. 39).
Utopias will always fail, then. They need to. They are no places. But they are important because they function to show us that radical thinking needs to be attempted; they deny that there are no alternatives (see p. 39)
N.B. In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, power and capital have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few transnational corporations, some of which 'own' nation states.
Thursday, 3 April 2014
The Digitisation Agenda in the UK
Documents related to digitisation policy in the UK can be found here:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2011/fundingforsustainability.aspx#downloads
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Digi-in-UK-v1-final.pdf
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2011/fundingforsustainability.aspx#downloads
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-Digi-in-UK-v1-final.pdf
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