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.

Various Joyful Encounters with the Dystopias of Affective Capitalism

Abstract: This article contends that what appear to be the dystopic conditions of affective capitalism are just as likely to be felt in various joyful encounters as they are in atmospheres of fear associated with post 9/11 securitization. Moreover, rather than grasping these joyful encounters with capitalism as an ideological trick working directly on cognitive systems of belief, they are approached here by way of a repressive affective relation a population establishes between politicized sensory environments and what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call a brain-becoming-subject. This is a radical relationality (Protevi, 2010) understood in this context as a mostly nonconscious brain-somatic process of subjectification occurring in contagious sensory environments populations become politically situated in. The joyful encounter is not therefore merely an ideological manipulation of belief, but following Gabriel Tarde (as developed in Sampson, 2012), belief is always the object of desire. The discussion starts by comparing recent efforts by Facebook to manipulate mass emotional contagion to a Huxleyesque control through appeals to joy. Attention is then turned toward further manifestations of affective capitalism; beginning with the so-called emotional turn in the neurosciences, which has greatly influenced marketing strategies intended to unconsciously influence consumer mood (and choice), and ending with a further comparison between encounters with Nazi joy in the 1930s (Protevi, 2010) and the recent spreading of right wing populism similarly loaded with political affect. Indeed, the dystopian presence of a repressive political affect in all of these examples prompts an initial question concerning what can be done to a brain so that it involuntarily conforms to the joyful encounter. That is to say, what can affect theory say about an apparent brain-somatic vulnerability to affective suggestibility and a tendency toward mass repression? However, the paper goes on to frame a second (and perhaps more significant) question concerning what can a brain do. Through the work of John Protevi (in Hauptmann and Neidich (eds.), 2010: 168-183), Catherine Malabou (2009) and Christian Borch (2005), the article discusses how affect theory can conceive of a brain-somatic relation to sensory environments that might be freed from its coincidence with capitalism. This second question not only leads to a different kind of illusion to that understood as a product of an ideological trick, but also abnegates a model of the brain which limits subjectivity in the making to a phenomenological inner self or Being in the world.

Dead Channel Surfing: the commonalities between cyberpunk literature and industrial music

Abstract: This paper explores the similarities between industrial music and ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction literature. Besides the obvious instances where there are direct references to each other, there are further connections between music and literature that are explored here. Situating the two forms within the tradition of twentieth-century Western dystopias, the focus of the paper is on the similarity of themes (relationship to technology, control by a totalitarian elite, apocalyptic worlds, resistance groups), techniques (in language or structure), moods (the tones and attitudes), and imagery (through language or music) used to illustrate and enhance these themes.

Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory

Abstract: This essay explores a narrative device familiar from sci-fi and dystopian fiction that is commonly used in literary and cultural responses to climate change, and which is particularly suggestive for thinking through the implications of the Anthropocene for memory and the field of memory studies. Works as generically diverse as Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), George Turner’s novel The Sea and Summer (1987), and Jan Zalasiewicz’s popular science book The Earth after Us (2008) all feature a historian, archivist, or geologist who looks back on our present moment from a distant vantage point in a dystopian, (almost) post-human future irrevocably marked by climate change. These works can thus be seen to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene—an era that requires the future anterior tense for its very conceptualization— to consider human and inhuman scales in relation to one another. The preoccupation with anticipated memory and preliminary or proleptic mourning evident in fictional future histories of climate change, which subvert the customary parameters of memory in terms of both scale and directionality, resonates with recent calls for memory studies to become more future-oriented instead of merely backward-looking. Scholars typically seek to make memory studies relevant to the present and the future by forging more robust links between memory and transitional justice or human rights discourses. Climate fiction of the future-history variety—which mourns future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass in the first place—presents another promising avenue for further research in the same spirit.

Presenting the Case for Social Change: The Creative Dilemma of Dystopian Writing for Children

Abstract: Since the late 1960s the futuristic fiction written for young readers has been disposed to make serious and disturbing comment on the likely direction of human civilization. During the 1970s and to the present day, a dark literature of emergency and despair has developed, expressing deep-rooted fears for the future of those children being addressed. As this dystopian genre has developed, its nightmarish imaginative landscapes have become increasingly intolerable, presenting a variety of repressive and tyrannically controlled states, whether writers conceive these as being neoprimitive or hypertechnological in essence. In the 1980s devastatingly bleak visions of the horrifying aftermath of nuclear war emerged, adding new levels of pessimism and concern about the future. Writers’ hypotheses about humankind’s likely lines of development have proved far from optimistic, and this large genre in children’s publishing has become characterized by extreme, arguably unprecedented, levels of anxiety and hopelessness.