Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Technological World‐Pictures

Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe.

Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction

Abstract: The promotional literature that lured sun-starved mid-westerners to Southern California in the 1880s hyped the region as the New Eden. But the novelists who created our vision of Los Angeles soon began to see it as Dystopia rather than Utopia, a corrupt, unreal city foreshadowing and reflecting all that is wrong with America. Now in the first literary history of Los Angeles in more than fifty years, David Fine traces the history of the place through the work of the authors who have defined it in our imaginations. The book begins with the mythifiers Helen Hunt Jackson, author of the quintessentially romantic 'Ramona' (1884) and Mary Austin, whose 1917 novel 'The Ford' was the first fictionalisation of the theft of water from the Owens Valley that became famous sixty years later in the movie 'Chinatown'. The author devotes chapters to both early and later Hollywood novels, to crime and detective novels, and to immigrant, ethnic, and apocalyptic fiction, paying detailed attention to the fiction of Upton Sinclair, James M Cain, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John Fante, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, Budd Schulberg, Christopher Isherwood, Alison Lurie, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Kate Braverman, and Carolyn See. The city's history, its architecture, even its disasters are all part of the story.

Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture

Abstract: Detroit techno is typically historicized as having grown out of the late 1970s and early 1980s middle-class, consumerist, and aspirational high school social party scene, giving the impression that Detroit techno artists created forward-thinking music as a means to acquire subcultural capital and (re)produce their identities. In this essay, this position is nuanced for a more complex understanding of techno’s relation to the quotidian phenomenological encounter with the dystopian setting of Detroit. Concomitantly, predominant theorizations of affect within the humanities, which emphasize the utopian, hopeful dimensions of affect’s inherent productivity, are supplemented for an understanding of productive energy revolving around affects of dystopia and on a certain hopelessness which scholars, in the years ahead, will increasingly have to negotiate. Keywords : techno, Detroit, dystopia, affect, aesthetic, desire, subculture