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Papers: [alphabetical order - A to F]
K Gediz Adkeniz
Istanbul University
gakdeniz@istanbul.edu.tr
The Post-Physicist in Harran
The progress in quantum mechanics, Godel theory, chaos theory, fractal
geometry, the big-bang, self-organization, unpredictability, complexity
and control (premonition) are said to have changed our worldview.
For some, this is the postmodern science that fostered drastic philosophical
and epistemological shifts, as a result of which deterministic philosophy
has conspicuously moved towards irrationalism and nihilism. Yet
within the world of physics, a physicist can spontaneously rediscover
himself as a post-physicist via an inner chaotic journey into this
complexity of knowledge. If this travel of the physicist is an irony,
Harran is the right port as one of the three locations that philosophy
took root in. If his journey is a metaphor, the chosen port is right
again: Harran, the port where Abraham had stopped by on his voyage
from Ur to the Promised Land. The post-physicist does not call for
a return to Harran; neither does he or she attempt to rebuild the
Tower of Babel (the new physics) in Mesopotamia, nor has a claim
for power as the 'Cyborg Physicist'. The post-physicist
will call for the completion or a rewriting of mythology, in defiant
of those who claim the opposite, with a desire to see all humanity
dancing around the fire lit by Zarathustra.
Keywords: utopian theory, utopian politics, contemporary utopias,
eco-villages
Stephan Aloszko
University of Plymouth
Utopian Analogies in the Nazi State
This paper will consider the societal links between the Nazi ceremonial
cities of Munchen, Nurnberg and Berlin with that of the concentration
and extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland. The author
will show how the three cities can be interpreted as models for
a German call for a return to a pre-Socrataen utopian city state.
From the outset of the Nazi dictatorship elaborate architectural
schemes and state rituals were created to underline the utopian
dreams of the political hierarchy. For those that subscribed to
and supported these ends the state could be said to seize them
in a trance like hold and offer them the vista of paradise. Any
voices of dissention were removed from society by use of state
sponsored exclusion; they were placed within the dystopia of the
camps and silenced, awaiting political re-education through brutality,
slave labour and starvation. Later this would be extended to the
disabled and minority groups and include euthanasia, ghettoisation
and extermination. Through a close reading of selected images
and texts it will be revealed that in the attempt to create a
Nazi utopia based on pre-Socratic ideals the very opposite became
the case.
Nicholas Anastasopoulos
National Technical University of Athens
aqua@studioa-arch.gr
Eco-communities: From Utopia to the brink of the everyday
eco-communities (or more commonly known as eco-villages) are socially,
economically and ecologically small size sustainable communities
usually with concrete principles in regards with consumerism,
food and energy self-reliance, with a focus on locality and the
environment and a clear social, economic and ecological structure.
They exist at the crossroads of utopia and mundane reality running
the whole gamut from alternative integrated urban communities
addressing the everyday to experimental secluded and rural communities
founded on very specific principles fitting to a closely-knit
group of people. Theories relating to ?co-communities and Intentional
Communities vary from the ones engaging the spiritual or metaphysical
to more or less radical return-to-nature practices, all the way
to activist grassroots based on the here-and-now efforts calling
for a battle from within the system that may gradually transform
an existing neighborhood, town or region into a community that
may end up qualifying as an eco-village if it eventually positively
adheres to the eco-village definition. (R.Gilman). This paper
will examine a number of eco-villages in Europe and the US as
case studies that will question their viability and applicability
as well as the factors that seem to affect their relationship
to the society at large. In addition, the paper will analyze the
challenges and premises of one of today's predominant theories
attempting to build bridges of the eco-village movement and the
mainstream society and academia in ways that will transfuse their
experience most critically in sustainability practices, while
at the same time they will validate there presence.
Keywords: eco-villages, intentional communities, activism,
political
Stephanie Belmer
York University
stephbelmer@yahoo.com
Utopia and Adorno's Sublime in Contemporary Art
I would like to consider a reinterpretation of the aesthetic category
of the sublime within contemporary art – specifically in
relation to the artist Gerhard Richter. I will do so within the
theoretical framework of Theodor Adorno's reading of the Kantian
sublime. Adorno reinterprets the Kantian sublime as the shudder
experienced in front of certain works of art, which forces the
individual to sense the limitations of his or her own rationality.
Implicit here is the utopic impulse animating much of Adorno's
work, which describes the possibility of a different, non-alienated
relationship with nature, or, in other words, a reconciliation
between human beings and nature that would not be based on domination
and control. Gerhard Richter, like the figures of Samuel Beckett
and Paul Celan who are held up by Adorno, foregrounds the loss
of this experience of nature in contemporary society. This is
especially evident in Richter's series 'October 18 1977', which,
in taking death as its theme, highlights the contradictions of
a reality where a meaningful relationship to nature is withheld.
In my presentation, I want to consider how Richter's work maintains
within painting a similar utopic quality as is evident in Adorno's
writing; in his practice, there is hope for a less alienated form
of experience, and that somehow, art will play a role in this
transformation.
Keywords: Utopia, Sublime, Art
Sarah Bennett
University of Plymouth
sarah.bennett@plymouth.ac.uk
Refuge for the 'Mad' or Refuge from the 'Mad'
My paper will explore the shift in function of a former Asylum,
Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum (1845) from asylum (a place
of exclusion) to gated enclave (a place of exclusivity). The former
asylum, originally designed to contain, regulate and control,
has recently been redeveloped as owner-occupier housing and re-packaged
as a former stately home for marketing purposes. The asylum represents
one 'utopian' vision, that of 'refuge' for the mad, whilst the
gated enclave represents a different 'utopian' vision, that of
'refuge' from the defiled city. My paper will propose that the
same spatial organisation that befitted the requirements of the
'mad-doctors' in providing spatial and temporal regulation to
counteract the psychic 'chaos' of the patients in the nineteenth
century, provides the new residents with opportunities for surveillance
and regulation. Boundary formation is central to both the asylum
and the enclave, and both involve the construction of walls and
rules (external power) and self-discipline (internal power). In
terms of the nineteenth century asylum, it was thought that power
over others in terms of confinement or external power, could be
assisted by power over the self i.e. internal power. The asylums
and other institutional edifices were designed for the dual purpose
of imposing external power through coercion and turning 'the subjects
of the confining regimes into agents of their own reformation'
(Markus 1993:95). My paper will explore if self-coercion is central
to the context of the twenty-first century gated community.
Keywords: Boundaries, coercion, control
Artur Blaim
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland
ablaim@hektor.umcs.lublin.pl
A Right-Wing Utopia Constructs its Dystopian Past:
the Case of Poland
The paper considers the on-going implementation of the nationalist-populist
project in Poland as an instance of the attempted realisation
of a right-wing utopia in a post-communist state. Attention will
be focused on the defining principle(s) of the utopian state,
the demarcation of the spatio-temporal boundary separating the
ideal state from its environment, the role of arts and sciences,
the aesthetic aspect of the utopian project, the myth of the founding
father(s), the project's self-description in the media and the
originary texts, and, most importantly, the construction of the
past as the necessary counterpart of the utopian future.
Keywords: right-wing utopia, space, time
Ludmila Gruszewska Blaim
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland
ludmila@hektor.umcs.lublin.pl
The (De)Textualisation of the Real: V for Vendetta
The paper analyses V for Vendetta in terms of the thematization
of the social function of the dystopian text. The film presents
the process of the textualization of the real aimed at making
the audience aware of the state of their own world. Whilst the
extrapolation of the tendencies present in that world is a standard
procedure in utopian, antiutopian, dystopian works, here the process
of textualization itself becomes the object of representation,
which is evident in the protagonist's attempts to de-automatize
the public perception of the dystopian world by constructing a
parallel dystopian reality of aestheticized terrorism: the complex
spectacle of blowing up the Old Bailey and the Houses of Parliament,
the fake imprisonment and interrogation of Evey, the ritualistic
killings, etc. Moreover, the theatrical aspect of V's reality
turns the spectators into actors, thus enabling them to overcome
their passivity instilled in them by the omnipresent totalitarian
media and become a part in the uprising against the regime.
Keywords: dystopia, dystopian film, textualisation
Maria Isabel Donas Botto
Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
isabotto@hotmail.com
Urban voids – expectant spaces, utopian places?
Urban voids are, at present, the object of much debate, given
the physical and social deterioration of cities, partly brought
about by rampant desindustrialization and the development of a
new urban economy. These large areas of unused land in urban centres
and peripheries are an integral part of the global urban landscape.
Often viewed as blots on the physical and aesthetic landscape
of cities – vestiges of a more or less recent past best
forgotten – they are coveted investment areas, either in
straightforward highly profitable projects of residential, commercial
or office building, or in public or privately funded experiments
in the design of “new spaces of urbanity”. In the
face of multiple plans for intervention in these urban voids –
and their rapid disappearance – a variety of voices, from
historians to artists and philosophers, has spoken out for their
preservation, stressing not only their “temporal value”
and evocative potential (as opposed to prevailing diagnoses as
wastelands and “landscapes of contempt”), but also
their standing as “indeterminate” and “expectant”
spaces, affording great possibilities for innovation and experimentation.
“Urban voids – The heart of the city” is the
theme of the first Trienal de Lisboa, an international architecture
conference, which will take place in Lisbon, in June, and which
will assemble architects and academics in a debate about the possibilities
of these spaces. Comparing current interpretations of urban voids
and some of the most recent proposals for their use as presented
at the Lisbon Trienal, this paper intends to reflect on the utopian
(or dystopian) dimension of these leftover urban spaces.
Keywords: city, urbanism, architecture
Penny Boumelha
University of Adelaide
penny.boumelha@adelaide.edu.au
Regeneration: Of Women, Nations, and Utopian Fiction
Utopian (and dystopian) fiction has evident appeal to writers
and readers in a period of significant reflection on fundamental
features of social organisation. In late nineteenth century Britain,
when public debates and moral panics about gender roles, sexuality,
migration, and disease were often grounded in a pervasive anxiety
about 'degeneration', there was a good deal of utopian writing.
In particular, it was widely taken up by writers concerned (in
one way or another) with changing gender roles, women's rights,
and relationships between family and wider social organisation.
This paper explores some of the narrative assumptions and strategies
to be found in these texts, and their ideological significance,
in the context of theoretical and critical traditions of engagement
with the utopian. The paper is concerned with the emergence of
blended and emergent forms of utopian writing in the fin de siècle
period, and with the way in which specific narrative structures
embody understandings of historical processes of change. Activist
and evolutionary paradigms of change are identified in some specific
texts of the period. It is argued that issues of gender and of
relationships between the sexes are at one constitutive of, and
troubling to, utopian narrative from its outset.
Keywords: gender, narrative, theory
Robert Brown
University of Plymouth
r4brown@plymouth.ac.uk
Fighting it out over Utopia
Zorrozaurre is at once both a peninsula and island, abandoned
yet inhabited. Above all it is a place of dreams for its inhabitants,
the Bilbao city government and its business community. Onto this
terrain each projects their own visions of what it is (whether
real or imagined) and what it might become.
Over its history this land bordering the Ria de Bilbao has been:
a fishing village; farmland; an industrial area; and currently
where Bilbao dumps its unwanted, e.g., abandoned cars, illegal
nightclubs, and industries too reluctant or inefficient to relocate
to the new port downriver. It is also home to a Bohemian community
of academics, artists and retirees, desperate to maintain their
idyllic 'village' life in a fabric of narrow streets and little
squares on the doorstep of Bilbao. Zorrozuarre is however a contested
domain; keen to maintain Bilbao's growth as an economic and cultural
centre, the city council has identified it as the next piece of
the puzzle to be reclaimed and reconnected to the river. To enable
this, they have acquiesced to private sector-led development.
In place of a post-industrial landscape deemed vacant, the developers
envision a mini-city populated by 15,000 upmarket residents living
in free-standing apartment blocks set in private grounds, accessible
from the city centre by new high speed roads. How these idealised
yet conflicting visions might be reconciled has been the focus
of recent project work by University of Plymouth graduate architecture
students. A key finding emerging from this study is the too-often
overlooked role of the streetscape in defining and sustaining
community. Against the backdrop of the redevelopment of Zorrozaurre,
this paper will consider what public space means in our understanding
of utopia.
Keywords: visions, conflicting, streetscape
Mário Caeiro
Luzboa
mariocaeiro@luzboa.com
1974-04 – The Social in Portuguese Art[s]
The threat to public space which is taking place in Portugal as
in many other developed countries should force the artistic community
to reconsider the significance of public space and social art.
This 'open' space should be awarded a role that provides a better
response to contemporary issues, namely basic human aspirations
concerning consciousness, creativity and aesthethic experience.
For the last thirty years, Portugal has witnessed a sort of artistic
indulgence: with exceptions of a short number of projects, Art
has forgotten its social emancipatory role. Rare performative
interventions and more institutionalized statements like Alternativa
Zero, in 1977, or Lisbon Capital of Nothing – Marvila 2001
are rare cases of a social and activist drive towards the artistic
and cultural landscape of Portugal. Both events, departing from
clear philosophic grounds, try to stimulate a sense of cultural
citizenship.
My intention is to reflect upon cultural events and artistic interventions
that represent, a Portugal, an utopian approach to urban life
in contemporary society. In a way, my objective is to elaborate
a critical approach to project practice in the complex field of
work that intersects urban design, architecture, politics, art,
education and other sciences and fields of knowledge. This means
cherishing practices that consider the significance of the transdisciplinary
approach of the artistic process, and also the promotion of an
updated idea of ethics, something we could summarize citing Hannah
Arendt's term 'natality', the process of becoming a mature self
through the perceptions of others. Utopia is not far from here.
Keywords: Portugal, Alternativa Zero, Lisbon Capital of Nothing,
natality
Deirdre Ní Chuanacháin
Deirdre.nichuanachain@ul.ie
University of Limerick, Ireland.
'To the limits of the lunar world': Utopia and Cosmic
Voyages
A Trip to the Moon (1728) by Murtagh Mcdermot published just two
years after Swift's Gulliver's Travels, was the first Irish Gulliverian
imitation of the eighteenth century. It is Irish in its place
of origin, terrestrial setting and author. As it takes its inspiration
in a large measure from Gulliver's Travels, it is among works
known as Gulliveriana. Through a natural phenomenon, a whirlwind
from the top of the Peak of Tenerife, Mcdermot is transported
to the lunar world. McDermot's narrative engages with the broader
societal issues of his time. These included the expansion of global
exploration and discovery together with the development of the
telescope. As a jeu d'esprit laden with references to contemporaneous
technical and scientific knowledge, it remains a proto work of
science fiction. It combines both a real journey to Tenerife and
the subsequent imaginary transportation to the lunar world in
a classic eighteenth century literary utopia.
Keywords: Gulliveriana, Cosmic Voyages
Gill Cockram
(Royal Holloway) University of London
e-mail: gill.cockram@btinternet.com
Ruskin and the Morality of the Marketplace
One of the main reasons for Ruskin's original poor reception as
a social and economic critic was that he drew much of his inspiration
from his study of art and architecture. Ruskin saw the production
of art, not only as a reflection of the nation's values, but also
as a metaphor for what he considered as the necessary degree of
reciprocity which should exist in the marketplace. Ruskin's ideal
economy envisaged a dynamic relationship between the producer
and the consumer, where the vital value of goods would not be
destroyed by a competitive market. This, for many economists,
was a difficult concept to grasp, especially in the context of
the mid-nineteenth century when the British economy was buoyant
and the laissez-faire philosophy all-pervasive. This paper will
argue that the way in which Ruskin drew this analogy is crucial,
not only to understanding him, but also in appreciating how far
his vision for a better society was gradually assimilated and
translated into a call for radical economic reform.
Keywords: Ruskin, Economic Reform
Amanda C. Cole
University of Sydney
amacole@gmail.com
'Many Inconvenient Truths': Exploring Parallels between
Contemporary Texts written by Environmental Soothsayers
This paper will explore three contemporary texts – a literary
work, a documentary and a non-fiction text – in order to
investigate the different responses to the planet in environmental
crisis. Doris Lessing's novel, The Story of General Dann and Mara's
Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006), Al Gore's documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and Tim Flannery's The Weather-Makers
(2006) will be investigated both separately and in relation to
each other. The analysis will ask (framed in the dystopian present
of the texts) how each work addresses the 'planetary emergency'
in terms of both form and content. It will then consider the possible
resolutions (framed in utopian pasts and futures) offered by each
text in response to this crisis. Ultimately, this paper will consider
the collision of purposes that transcends literary type and betrays
the urgency of this issue facing potential life, let alone potential
utopias, in the present and the future.
Keywords: Contemporary Utopian Fiction/Non-Fiction, Global
warming, Dystopian Present
Kirsti Karra Cole
Arizona State University
kkcole@gmail.com
Diagrams of the Future: Radical Feminist Rhetoric
and Utopia
This paper is part of a larger project interested in exploring
the connections in women's literature and women's political rhetoric
that seek to construct a new utopia. Utopian societies were a
common theme in the United States' radical feminist movement (1967-1974).
In women's literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Margaret Atwood
explore the utopian/dystopian social and discursive binary, however,
there is a large gap in the current scholarship on the rhetoric
of women's utopia in the feminist movement, which constructed
a political agenda focused on revolution and a resulting utopia.
David Bouchier (1979) argues that the radical feminist movement
provided the women's movement with its impetus as well as its
theoretical framework. Though he provides an ample analysis of
utopian characteristics in feminist theory, he does not provide
a specific understanding of the impact of utopian theory on radical
feminism, and of radical feminism on a new and evolving concept
of utopia. In The Dialectic of Sex (1971), Shulamith Firestone
presents an argument for revolution that seeks to provide a concrete
diagram for a utopian future. Her work, though highly controversial,
deconstructs sex class, a term to denote the foundational class
system at the root of all other social and political oppressions,
through her historical analysis of the women's movement. Firestone
formulates a new utopian society to equalize the class system.
Even within the feminist movement, Firestone's work is sometimes
dismissed as too radical. I argue that her revolutionary theory
provides the feminist movement with an important rhetoric for
achieving utopia.
Keywords: Radical Feminism; Women's Political Rhetoric; Feminist
Utopia
Nathaniel Coleman
Newcastle University
nathaniel.coleman@ncl.ac.uk
An uncanny optimism
In his book, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development
(1973), Manfredo Tafuri convincingly argues for the inevitable
end of architecture; eclipsed as it were by the excesses of the
market, to be replaced by a building industry populated with technicians.
In his view, the 'art of building' must pass into oblivion. Anyone
still harbouring the idea that projects could fulfil architectural
dreams for good places must be suffering from a severe case of
'false consciousness' that only a strong dose of 'ideology critique'
could cure. Although the evidence of most architectural production
and building shows Tafuri's prognosis to be generally sound, on
occasion, conflicting evidence emerges to suggest that something
like architecture does still remain a possibility. For Tafuri,
and numerous practitioners alike, persistent utopian imagination
is proof of a negative propensity for exiting so-called 'reality'
for a netherworld of impossible fantasy and failure. Nevertheless,
something must be wrong with such a picture. The world as it 'is',
made in an image of supposedly clear-eyed, ideology-free, economic
practicalities mostly ends up being devoid of wonder at best and
verges toward dystopia at worst. As an antidote to the dour realism
of Tafuri's brand of Marxist critique and capitalist realism alike,
this paper argues that an architecture of enchantment—no
matter how impractical it might seem—is worth pursuing (examples
of which will be discussed). Most importantly, such architecture
is ever the result of an uncanny optimism that only utopian perspectives
can nourish. (243 words)
Keywords: uncanny optimism, utopian perspectives, architecture
of enchantment
Ronald Creagh
Ronald.Creagh@wanadoo.fr
Anarchism is back. We may now re(dis)cover utopia
Radical changes in social movements have occurred throughout the
West since the end of the nineteenth century. As Marxism spread
through most countries, it dismissed the utopian vision which
had impregnated all blueprints for a different society and rejected
anarchism; other socialists also cast off their former utopian
visions, rejected their anarchistic comrades and adopted national
standpoints in order to compete within the political systems of
their respective countries. Anarchism is back. We may now re(dis)cover
utopia. The contemporary resurgence of anarchistic currents within
the movement for global world alternatives, as well as the emergence
of new theories of chaos, call for a dismissal of the heritage
of the ultra leftist philosophy of ressentiment and denunciation
and a new look at anarchist utopian philosophy of cosmic and social
order and creativity. This communication will first examine some
changes in the definition of utopia. It will then present some
traits of the anarchist utopian heritage. And it will finally
suggest that contemporary intellectual paradigms and social situations
require a new approach to utopia and its relation to anarchy.
Keywords: Marxism, anarchy, anarchist utopian heritage
Laurence Davis
Dublin, Ireland
Ldavis@oceanfree.net
Social Anarchism and Lifestyle Anarchism: A Bridgeable
Chasm?
In a brief but hugely controversial book published in 1995, Social
Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, the late
Murray Bookchin lambasted contemporary anarchists for abandoning
their social revolutionary and utopian aspirations in favour of
an introspective personalism, escapist aestheticism, and chic
boutique lifestyle subculture that posed no serious threat to
the existing powers that be. In this paper I wish to consider
the merits of Bookchin's critique. I will do so from three different
perspectives: first, historically, by tracing the development
of anarchist currents in the European and North American countercultures
from the 1960s; second, sociologically, by examining the anarchist
elements in the contemporary alter-globalisation movement; and
third, philosophically, by questioning whether Bookchin's dichotomous
alternatives of social anarchism or lifestyle anarchism exhaust
the range of ideological options open to contemporary anarchists.
Keywords: Bookchin, Anarchism, Culture
Ian Donnachie
The Open University
I.Donnachie@open.ac.uk
Utopian Designs. The Architecture of the Owenite Communities
Robert Owen first presented his ideas for model communities, initially
and roughly based on the architecture of New Lanark in 1817. The
plans, or 'Village Scheme', later the 'Villages of Unity and Mutual
Co-operation', were gradually developed to find more detailed
expression in the Report to the County of Lanark of 1820. As early
as 1817 Owen had commissioned artists, possibly including John
Winning, who produced drawings of New Lanark, to prepare engravings
showing the proposed communities. Some were printed up as broadsheets
to be circulated with his propaganda or to audiences at meetings
called to promote his ideas. Large format versions were used as
visual aids for public display, as seen on the Irish tour, 1822-23.
The Motherwell Scheme, a proposal arising from Owen's Report,
seems to have been modelled on these early designs featuring the
rectangular layout with classically functional architecture typified
by the buildings at New Lanark. Subsequently this became the model
for the Orbiston Community, 1825-28, the only one ever built to
Owen's plan.
About this time Owen was joined by Stedman Whitwell, a young architect
and convert to Owenism. Whitwell produced more detailed plans
for the new communities, altogether more elaborate with time,
but sticking closely to the rectangular layout. By 1824 Owen had
abandoned Britain and Ireland and left for New Harmony in the
US, where Whitwell's design was to be implemented once the Community
of Equality was established. Whitwell not only produced detailed
proposals and drawings, but a massive model, transported across
the Atlantic for public display in 1825. Although subsequent efforts
at community were made, none featured these designs, but Owen
kept returning to them, for example in Home Colonies, and they
also became icons of utopian community design long after the demise
of Owenism. This paper reviews the designs and their architecture
in the context of Owen's ideas, suggesting influences from other
planned communities of the period, for example, the villages for
the poor established in the Netherlands (visited by Robert Dale
Owen) and elsewhere, and contemporary public architecture, such
as prison design.
Keywords: Owenism, communities, architecture
Caroline Edwards
The University of Nottingham
caroline.edwards@warwickgrad.net
Radical Democracy and the Passing of Mass Utopianism:
The Minor Utopias of Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri and Ernesto Laclau/Chantal
Mouffe
How can we understand Utopia in post-Cold War critical theory?
Is Utopia a place at which we can or should arrive? This paper
will look at the relation between rethinking Utopia as a pluralised
space of critical differences and theorising the 'crisis' of democracy
in globalised or transnational capitalism in the work of Michael
Hardt/Antonio Negri (Empire, Multitude) and Ernesto Laclau/Chantal
Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). Drawing on Jay Winter's
identification of 'minor utopias,' distinct from the catastrophic
dreamworlds of mass utopianism, this paper will identify 'moments
of possibility' in these two analyses of revolutionary agency
that broaden our understanding of the intersections between globalised
space and time. As Susan Buck-Morss notes, the dissolution of
the ontological divide between 'Eastern' and 'Western' political
imaginaries in the post-Cold War period threatens the possibility
of difference requisite to critical thinking. This paper will
identify the 'minor' Utopian moments in the work of Hardt/Negri
and Laclau/Mouffe, arguing that the Cold War axis of binary oppositions
has given way to destabilised critical positions that question
the concept of a monolithic, collective Utopia. By stressing a
'politics of incompleteness' both theorisations emphasise the
unpredictable direction that new globalised networks of production,
communication and supra-national jurisdiction will take, but also
the constituent possibilities of radical democracy they offer.
Finally, they negotiate questions of global citizenship, global
counter-culture and a global public sphere as challenges for the
Left and for critical theory that also offer profoundly Utopian
and immanent socio-political opportunities.
Keywords: democracy, agency, globalisation
Olga Rodríguez Falcón
Middlesex University, School of Arts. PhD candidate
olgafal@yahoo.co.uk
Utopian Anachronisms and the Contemporary Nostalgia
for the Lost City: Havana in Cinema and Photography
Utopia, dystopia and heterotopia are the three most common terms
applied to Havana during the ten years of the 'Special Period',
that is, the decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union,
when the island suffered one of its most acute economic crises.
Taking into account that Cuba was then considered as a social
experiment still in progress within the western hemisphere, its
appeal after the events of 1989 in Europe would be mainly related
to this perception of the island as a relevant political rarity
on its way to extinction. In this paper I will discuss the idea
of the anachronistic image and its utopian character in Havana's
contemporary photographic and cinematographic representations.
Using Wim Wenders' music documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
as exemplary of this trend, I will discuss how Havana appears
to the western spectator as a city embodying the 'ideal commonwealths',
as defined by Lewis Mumford in his 1923 text. I will propose that
it was not just the fact that Cuba was a self-defined socialist
country that created this discourse on the utopian around its
social and cultural particularities. It was also the result of
Havana's visual otherness at a moment when modern architecture
and western universalism were still being contested. Finally,
I will explain how this visual otherness is the product of the
different historical development experienced by the city after
the 1959 revolution, but also a consequence of social and cultural
contingencies that can be traced further back in the city's history.
Keywords: anachronism, heterotopia, postmodern nostalgia
Jill Fenton
Queen Mary, University of London
Email: j.fenton@qmul.ac.uk
Debating Geographies of Hope: the significance of
Ernst Bloch's concept of surplus utopia to present day activisms
An anticipatory narrative in Ernst Bloch's work Spuren illustrates
the magnitude of a straw hat being toppled from the head of a
bourgeois man who, on 14 July 1928, during celebrations in Paris
of the storming of Bastille, is trying to make his way through
a crowd. The narrative communicates a trace from the past provoking
a moment of revolt in the present and illustrates how Ernst Bloch's
utopian analysis evokes a geography of hope for contemporary social
movements that are committed to opposing the global war on terror,
victimisation of minority groups, and who are active in opposing
global capitalism. Bloch's concept of surplus utopia perceives
that the past illuminates the present and has the possibility
of directing society towards a better future. Through consideration
of the linkages between the Paris Commune and May '68, France's
winter of '95 and moments of revolutionary activity such as opposition
to the war in Iraq in 2003, this paper discusses the importance
of Bloch's under-explored concept of surplus utopia. The paper
further develops Lefebvre's discussion of the transformation of
space through festival and carnival and makes an innovative and
important contribution to cultural geography's consideration of
repetitive and reversible temporality as well as the production
of spaces by social movements that look towards the possible while
stimulating the notion of utopian space. 'Now their hands had
something to do as well, they could reach for the straw hat as
it was tossed through the air [..] until it finally lay on the
ground, degraded and crushed, a very modest, very allegorically
trampled representative of the Bastille.
Keywords: Bloch, Spuren, Bastille, Lefebvre, festival and
carnival
Maria Aline Ferreira
University of Aveiro, Portugal
aline@mail.ua.pt
Women Scientists in Utopia: A Science of Their Own
In this paper I propose to examine representations of women scientists
in utopian/dystopian texts. I will reflect on the vexed question
of a feminist science and will consider Joan Slonczewski's A Door
Into Ocean (1986), Carl Djerassi's An Immaculate Misconception:
Sex in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (2000) and Gwyneth Jones's
Life (2004) in terms of the kind of science practised by the women
scientists in those works. These narratives engage with debates
about not only the ways in which science is perceived as predominantly
androcentric, but also the hierarchies and exclusions associated
with it, thematizing the sexual politics of scientific research
and the inevitable power dynamics associated with it. As a theoretical
framework I will draw on what Barbara Tomlinson described as "Phallic
Fables and Spermatic Romance" and on feminist critiques and
revision of the rhetoric of molecular biology, as well as other
recent work on feminist epistemology and the philosophy of science,
in particular that of Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sandra
Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller.
Keywords: Science, Gender, Rhetoric of Science
Joachim Fischer
University of Limerick
joachim.fischer@ul.ie
A Future Ireland under German rule: Dystopias as propaganda
during World War I
During World War I an anti- and pro-German propaganda war raged
in Ireland which involved various scenarios of what a future Ireland
would look like should the Germans ever invade Ireland. This scenario
arose out of the fact that the rebels who eventually unleashed
the Rebellion on Easter Monday 1916 in order to achieve independence
for Ireland had actively campaigned for German help in their fight
against the common enemy, Britain. After a brief overview over
the historical situation and the various ideological positions
held in Ireland at the time, the paper will deal in particular
with two texts, one from the south of Ireland, Baron von Kartoffel
(pseud. for Mary Carbery), The Germans in Cork (1916), and one
from the north, James Richardson, The Germans at Bessbrook. A
Dream (1917). The paper will analyse the characteristics of the
future societies imagined and place them into the context of other
contemporary utopian discourses about the future of Ireland. It
will also abstract from the specific topic in question and aim
to make a contribution to the study of utopia/dystopia as political
propaganda in general. The paper would fit into topic areas 1
and 3; Histories and Politics of Utopia; it can be tailored somewhat
to fit better into the context the organizers may want to suggest.
Keywords: Irish utopias, dystopias as propaganda, World War
I
Freee art collective
www.freee.org.uk
info@freee.org.uk
Utopia, Art and the Counter-Public Sphere
Freee is an art collective made up of 3 artists, Dave Beech, Andy
Hewitt and Mel Jordan, who work together on art projects that
entail and enact cultural strategies for alternatives to the official
debased public sphere. Freee occupies the public sphere in ways
that resist its colonization by private commercial interests and
instrumentalized social relations. In this way, Freee art projects
are a practical engagement in utopia. In the political philosophy
of utopia, art is either considered to be a promise of happiness,
a model of unalienated labour, or, just as often, a luxurious
product of a materialistic society, and a distracting irrelevance
to the economic and strategic road to utopia. Perry Anderson,
for instance, in The Tracks of Historical Materialism describes
the shift from economics to culture within Western Marxism as
a 'glittering compensation for their neglect of the structures
and infrastructures of politics and economics' in which aesthetics
'came to be surcharged with all the values that were repressed
or denied elsewhere in the atrophy of the living socialist politics'.
Speaking as artists who have identified art and culture as their
primary site of struggle, the Freee art collective cannot share
the political critique of art and culture as a withdrawal from
politics proper. It is not that as artists we have an interest
in the persistence and defence of art – quite the contrary,
as artists working in an avantgarde tradition a major part of
our practice and our struggle is against art. But we do want to
argue that the struggle within culture against the cultural hegemony
is a struggle that cannot be by-passed on the road to utopia.
Our argument is neither that art is somehow already imbued with
utopianism, nor that utopia will come to resemble anything that
is presently associated with art; we will suggest, rather, that
art is one of the key fields through which utopia can be brought
about. Artists contribute to the critique of contemporary society
and help shape our visions of a better future. Contemporary art's
role within the public sphere, especially that art today which
engages directly in the formation of counter-publics, is to prepare
a culture fit for a society that is no longer distorted by private
commerce interests and the structures of power. Without this kind
of cultural transformation, utopia will be empty and hollow.We
will introduce and expand upon the above concerns and describe
two art projects that support this position. We will distribute
our on-going badge project 'I will not accept the ways things
are' alongside our current manifesto The Freee art collective
manifesto for a counter – hegemonic art.
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