The future imagined: exploring utopia and dystopia in popular art as a means of understanding today’s challenges and tomorrow's options (original) (raw)
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European science policy (so-called Horizon 2020) is guided by Grand Societal Challenges (GSCs) with the explicit aim of shaping the future. In this paper we propose an innovative approach to the analysis and critique of Europe's GSCs. The aim is to explore how speculative and creative fiction offer ways of embodying, telling, imagining, and symbolising 'futures', that can provide alternative frames and understandings to enrich the grand challenges of the 21st century, and the related rationale and agendas for ERA and H2020. We identify six ways in which filmic and literary representations can be considered creative foresight methods (i.e. through: creative input, detail, warning, reflection, critique, involvement) and can provide alternative perspectives on these central challenges, and warning signals for the science policy they inform. The inquiry involved the selection of 64 novels and movies engaging with notions of the future, produced over the last 150 years. Content analysis based on a standardised matrix of major themes and sub-domains, allows to build a hierarchy of themes and to identify major patterns of long-lasting concerns about humanity's future. The study highlights how fiction sees oppression, inequality and a range of ethical issues linked to human and nature's dignity as central to, and inseparable from innovation, technology and science. It concludes identifying warning signals in four major domains, arguing that these signals are compelling, and ought to be heard, not least because elements of such future have already escaped the imaginary world to make part of today's experience. It identifies areas poorly defined or absent from Europe's science agenda, and argues for the need to increase research into human, social, political and cultural processes involved in techno-science endeavours.
The humanities investigation sets out to explore the concepts of a sub-genre of science fiction – dystopian narratives and its counter-part, utopian narratives. Initially exploring the nature of science fiction the study analyses how SF interacts with society, audiences and technology. Many researchers recognize SF as far more than just a genre of media exclusive to entertainment, the genre has practicalities in relating fields of science as well as design and engineering. Using two methodologies of analysis; the fields of both textual and audience and applying them to two dystopian SF films – Children of Men (2006) and Equilibrium (2002) the investigation explores different concepts relating to society including: terrorism, immigration, religion and fan-fiction. This wide range of study allows for a general approach towards the nature of SF, looking closely at the link between producer and audience of media texts. The aim is to find whether SF has deeper implications in society and its predictions of our future, and use theorists and ideas to conduct further analysis.
Contemporary Visions of the Future in Literature and Art introduction
2018
O n february 2018 a group of scholars from the social sciences and the humanities met in Paris for an intense workshop. The workshop was organized by Stanford University and by the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.1 The meeting had two goals in mind: to examine the ways in which contemporary cultural productions imagine the future and to search for intellectual pathways that will provide us with the language needed in order to speak today about our common tomorrow. The idea was to explore how current narratives attempt to make sense of, reflect, and react to the rapid pace of social, political, and technological changes of the last few decades. As part of the discussion, the workshop addressed issues related to temporal modes, analyzing the chronotopes of our contemporary time, looking into the time-space models or molds that shape some of the narratives about the future. While the ques...
The Visualisation of Utopia in Recent Science Fiction Film
Colloquy 14
Utopia can be conceived as a possibility a space within language, a set of principles, or the product of technological development but it cannot be separated from questions of place, or more accurately, questions of "no place." 1 In between the theoretically imaginable utopia and its realisation in a particular time and place, there is a space of critique, which is exploited in anti-Utopian and critical dystopian narratives. 2 In Science Fiction narratives of this kind, technology is responsible for the transformation of the utopian impulse into a set of principles that are precisely stated and rigidly enforced. The critique focuses on the impossibility of any systematic realisation of a eutopia, where the positive qualities of freedom, individualism and creativity are nurtured, due to the reductive force of instrumental reason. The films Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks, 2002), and Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Columbia, 1997), both examine utopian claims through speculation on the possible future use of current technologies, the tools of crime investigation and the genome project respectively. However, examining the plot does not attend sufficiently to the particular properties of film and how it, as a medium, constructs utopia as a place. This article aims to address this issue by examining how technologically derived images of utopia are realised in the visual space of film, that is, on the level of the mise en scène. These images are often dystopic but the distinction between dystopia and eutopia is not crucial to the argument because the aim is not to return utopianism to its place at the vanguard of progressive politics nor is it to reject utopianism on the basis that it is unrealisable but rather to examine how technology and utopianism can combine in the visual language of film. 3 The issue examined here is how utopia is conceived according to the specific features of the medium rather than to present an overarching narrative judgement as to the value of utopian principles. In Gattaca, the utopianism of a genetically determined future is reproduced in the mise en scène as a set of aesthetic principles whereas in Minority Report the utopian technology itself resembles the apparatus of film. This involves two quite different approaches to the visualisation of utopia: 4 in Gattaca, utopia is embodied in a society in which there can be "no other place," realised through the subtraction or reduction of visual difference; in Minority Report, utopia is an expression of a panoptic regime that can incorporate all visual and cultural difference such that the visible is "every place."
Future Foresight through Speculative Visual Fiction: Technology and Individual Freedom via 'Nosedive', 2018
The concept of film as philosophizing emphasizes the relation between film and philosophy as intimately related in a way that they share the problems to which they respond in distinctive ways, therefore opening up new possibilities of thought. Speculative visual fiction genre, by the potential of the images it includes, ontologically, has a capacity to depict contingency that describes an undetermined capacity to act with potentially open outcomes and thus implies the possibility to shape and influence the future events. Therefore, speculative visual fiction genre by its capacity to create speculative imagination can be considered as a sub-field of future studies, which can give access to a scope of future possibilities and can create social foresight to bring about societies that can respond to the futures they perceive. Thus, this paper aims to answer if speculative visual fiction genre by its very capacity to philosophize and to speculate on the precise relationship between individuals and technology could be a reference for the critical foresight of the future by using the methodology of close reading of the 'Nosedive' episode of the Black Mirror TV series as a piece of work belong to this genre. Hence, 'Nosedive', the first episode of the third season of the Black Mirror TV Series, by putting forward the idea that people's individual freedom is mitigated by their own consents with the use of information and communication technologies within precisely free societies in which there is no coercion coming from an external agent, should be considered as a critical foresight on the future of technology and its effects to individuals and to societies.
Some thoughts on the utopian film
Science Fiction Film & Television, 2017
In film, the positive utopia-the eutopia-is basically non-existent. There is a wide agreement among scholars that a typical eutopia lacks some very basic elements of a typical narrative film: it neither features a conflict that drives the plot forward nor real characters with individual traits-both of which are required by feature films in the classical Hollywood tradition. This article argues that there are areas beyond Hollywood mainstream movies that are much better suited for filmic utopias. After all, the literary utopia is characterised by its hybrid nature; it is a blend between narrative and philosophic dialogue. In the classic utopia, the fictional story only serves as a frame for the detailed description of the utopian state. The primary goal of this draft is not an exact implementation, but rather a reminder that alternatives can be conceived. Utopias in this sense are much more tightly bound to a specific historical reality; therefore, non-fiction films are much better suited for utopias. The article gives a theoretical sketch of how utopias and documentaries fit together and analyses Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist: Addendum as an exemplary utopian non-fiction film.
Utopia, Dystopia and the Global Order of the Image, Neagu (ed).pdf
Foreword Imagination dead, imagine! (Samuel Beckett, 1965) Taking utopia and dystopia to be the defining sensibilities of global times, in the proposed volume we seek to explore the structures of the global imagination from a perspective informed by comparative poetics and global theory. As expressions of the social imaginary, utopia and dystopia have galvanized the spirit of each age, firing the imagination of writers, historians, philosophers, political thinkers. Since Aristotle’s Republic through Thomas More’s Utopia to the post-apocalyptic trends of the global times, utopian/dystopian thinking has constantly testified to the propensity of the human mind to conjure up ideal or dark visions of the future. Beyond this disposition of the mind toward envisioning societies of the future, utopia/dystopia foregrounds itself as a ‘structure in waiting’, a’space of the possibles’ reflective of the ethos of a certain community at a given time, illustrative of its guiding beliefs, ideals and, above all, of its fears, i.e. what Ana-Karina Schneider, in her systemic approach to 9/11 as a generic and periodical marker, terms a “structure of feeling.” Profuse and prolific, capable of great versatility, utopia is as protean and heterogeneous as the variegated mediums in which it has manifested itself so far: fiction, film, TV series, comics, computer games, and creative writing blogs. Suffice it to look at utopian/dystopian cinematic representations alone to note that, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to The Wachowschi’s Brothers’ Matrix (1999), running through the visual imagination is a strain of millennialism, the morphological traits of which are identifiable in the various religious utopias, the ecology utopias, political utopias, economic utopias, feminist utopias, indeed the science and technology utopias engendered by the literary imaginary from early modernity to hypermodernity. Observing this at work with a keen eye for confluence and convergence, Corin Braga and Sämuel Ludwig provide contemporary insights into original sites of utopia, as the imagined and intentional lieux de mémorire foregrounded by canonical literary texts. In “Utopia: between Eutopia and Outopia,” Corin Braga revisits Thomas More’s Utopia, deconstructing its dual modal structure, standing “between the possible and the impossible,” between eutopia and outopia with a view to appraising its twofold, metadiscursive levels of representation. Rethinking William James’s theory of truth, Sämuel Ludwig sheds new light on the utopology-dystopology equation streaming through America determinism, in so doing, tracing anew the cultural filiation underpinning the American realist tradition. But whereas the patterns of continuity are ostensibly more likely, congenial and evident, the elements of incongruity and/or change particularizing the utopian/dystopian thinking and sensibility in global times are perhaps less distinct hence at least equally worth investigating. And it is the turns and twists of this ‘brave new world ageism’ that the present volume, among other, sets out to explore, the ‘new directions from old’ , its new departures under the transformative power of the global condition. Typically, globalization is construed as the cultural logic of processes of standardisation, to many, synonymous with ’Americanisation’. In the present volume, we take issue with this thesis, in the attempt to make the case for a cognitive rather than culture-specific model of global theory, one that views knowledge structures as significantly more consequential and reflective of global anxieties than the cultural patterns to which they give rise. Working in the medium of literature, culture history, film and television, we aim at identifying a set of dominants constitutive of the global ‘order of imagination’, wherein ‘order’ is understood in the Durandian acceptation of the term, i.e. as ’regime of the image’. For while it is beyond the scope of our enquiry here to embark upon in-depth analyses of the topoï and tropoï of the utopian/dystopian imaginary, we do hope to shed light on some of the dominant motifs resurfacing in global cultural production. ‘Liaising’ between the post-apocalyptic horizon pre-/9/11 and the posthumanist dimensions of post/9/11 fiction, Ana-Maria Schwab delves into the Manhattan dystopia of the by now E.L. Doctorow classic The Waterworks (1994), engaging a close reading of Doctorow’s dystopian future structured as a recurrent past. One of the central tenets of the present investigation is that dystopian projections, in general and apocalyptic trends, in particular, form an integral part of global sensibility, with catastrophe looming large on the horizon of expectation of globality and dystopia as a dominant cognitive paradigm. Drawing inevitably on the utopian repertoire, the anti-utopia, particularly in its global guise, of posthumanist allegory and digital catastrophe, postapocalysm, as I argue, becomes a natural dis/order of the world. “Post-Apocalypse Now: Globalism, Posthumanism, and the ‘Imagination of Disaster’” if anything attempts to uncover what I envisage as a shift in the dystopian imaginarium, from an epistemological to an ontological regime. In her examination of the Asian cyborg as the universal, posthuman subject, Amelia Precup takes stock of this particular metamorphosis into a ‘cyborg-topian future’ as projected in Karen Tei Yamashita’s performance prose “Anime Wong” (2014). The dystopian ontologies of globalism, culminating in the doctrines and aesthetics of posthumanism, could not be accounted for in absence of a return to Enlightenment, symbolic thinking and radical critique; or else, the passage from humanism and its protocapitalist ethics to posthumanist poetics and corporate capitalism goes through postmodern allegory the province of David Howard’s original and unsettling collage, “Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the 21st Century.” In a seminal work devoted to the archeologies of utopian fiction, Northrop Frye placed utopia at the centre of the fictional experience, recalling to mind the ultimately inherently utopian structure of all literary works, all configuring to a certain extent a’ no-place’ to be inhabited and populated by the receiving subject. In what follows, we sought to build on the Durandian metaphor toward an enhanced and, as we hope, topical exploration of the limits and limitations of the global imagination. Adriana Neagu Cluj, 25 October 2016
Narrating the Future: A World-Literary Take on the Crisis of Imagination and the Novel (2023)
Poetics Today, 2023
This article intervenes in the current debates that revolve around the possibility of imagining and narrating utopian projects and alternative futures. Very often these debates culminate in the diagnosis that the future is too complex to be adequately represented in narrative form and that the imagination more generally is in crisis. To move beyond what increasingly seems like an impasse in this theoretical discourse, the author suggests that the inquiry should take into account the heterogeneity of futural visions across the world-literary field by shifting the focus from its core regions to the semi-periphery. Reframing the problem of the future as that of collective action rather than of complexity, the author proposes that the perceived failure of narrative imagination is, in fact, an expression of the generic limits of the novel, limits that are particularly visible on the world-literary semi-periphery. To illustrate these points, the author offers an analysis of Taras Antypovych's Khronos (2011) and discusses how the pervasive concern with the future structurally manifests itself in the contemporary Ukrainian novel as a lack of transformative collective agency.