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.

Utopia without us

Abstract: As the prospect of self-authored human extinction increasingly appears as a plausible scenario of human futures, a growing number of efforts aim at comprehending it as the prospect of the world without us. Patricia Vieira convincingly shows in her essay on utopia and dystopia in the Anthropocene that utopianism has become a prominent interpretive strategy to render the possibility of human extinction meaningful. This brief reflection argues against the feasibility of considering the world without us in utopian terms. It identifies three tacit assumptions in utopian interpretations of our disappearance: they (1) take for granted that prospects of human extinction and post-apocalyptic themes are of the same kind; (2) presume that the biological character of human extinction needs no special attention when situating it with the social character of utopian thinking; and (3) remain committed to an anthropocentric view in assuming that we are the ones to attribute meaning even to the world defined by our absence. In challenging these assumptions, the essay develops three theses on the relation of utopia and the prospect of the world without us.

A Comparison of Dystopian Nightmares and Utopian Dreams: Two Paths in Science Fiction Literature That Both Lead to Humanity’s Loss of Empathy

Abstract: Science fiction literature has long dreamed of extravagant utopias and dreaded nightmarish dystopias. Authors from the birth of the genre to more current times find the erosion of empathy to be the downfall of either extreme form of society. On the one hand, George Orwell’s tyrannical climate of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1961) may seem worlds away from the hedonistic faux-paradise of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or the fallen society of Margaret Atwood’s attempted-utopia turned dystopia in Oryx and Crake (2004). However, whether a fictional world is allowed to go too far into utopian dreams through drug use, hyper-sexualization and the like, or whether it is all repressed into a dark authoritarian regime, members of each societal type undergo a loss of empathy which eventually becomes the downfall of civilization. It is notable as well that in both novels where science progresses rapidly without the check of ethics, and in literature where androids or modified human beings become too advanced for mankind to keep in the confines of a lawful society, it is the lack of empathy that causes death, destruction, and/or social disconnection and psychopathy. Though the pleasurable aspects of utopian classics and the unpleasant facets of dystopian books appear at first to be polar opposites, they indeed both reflect a society that is losing its sense of empathy and which is collapsing.

Dystopian wor(l)ds: language within and beyond experience

Abstract: This thesis examines language in a range of modern and contemporary dystopian literary fiction, and argues for a reinterpretation of Whorfian linguistics as a means of advancing understanding of the dystopian genre's acknowledged propensity to influence the habitual world-view of its readership. Using close stylistic analysis, and with an emphasis on textual patterning, it identifies and examines two distinct and characteristic `languages' of dystopia, and considers the ways in which these discourses contribute to linguistic relativity as a dynamic process in the reading of these fictions. Chapter one defines more precisely the literary genre of dystopia, particularly in relation to notions of space and time, and emphasises the genre's necessary participation in the socio-historical circumstances of its conception and production (the site of a discourse here termed reflective language). The (re)placement of these environments in a futuristic setting is also examined and is shown to be marked by a second discourse, termed speculative language. Chapter two outlines the theoretical foundations of the study and supports its positioning at the interface between the study of language and the study of literature by drawing on theories from both disciplines to orient its subsequent analyses. In this chapter, the concept of linguistic relativity, or Whorfianism, is re-figured as a process intrinsic to the reading of dystopian narratives, and is combined with the more literary critical theory of cognitive estrangement. In order to maintain focus on the reader-text relationship, and to locate the analyses from a readerly perspective, some common, or `folklinguistic', beliefs about translatability and the `inadequacy' of language are also invoked. Chapters three, four, and five are devoted to case studies: chapter three discusses the non-Newspeak speculative language in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and chapter four begins with an analysis of reflective language in the same novel before looking at three other twentieth-century dystopian texts (Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night, L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale). Chapter five brings together speculative and reflective language in its consideration of Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which also serves to bring this study into the twenty-first century. A summary and conclusions follow in chapter six.

Tenses of imagination : Raymond Williams on science fiction, utopia and dystopia

Abstract: Contents: Space Anthropology, Utopia, and Putropia. Left Culturalism: Science Fiction (1956) - William Morris (1958) - George Orwell (1958) - The Future Story as Social Formula Novel (1961) - Terror (1971) - Texts in their Contexts. Cultural Materialism: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1971) - The City and the Future (1973) - On Orwell: An Interview (1977) - On Morris: An Interview (1977) - Learning from Le Guin. (Anti-) Postmodernism: Utopia and Science Fiction (1978) - The Tenses of Imagination (1978) - Beyond Actually Existing Socialism (1980) - Resources for a Journey of Hope (1983) - Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 (1984) - The Future Novels: From The Volunteers (1978) - From The Fight for Manod (1979).

Artistic practices & democratic politics: towards the markers of uncertainty: from counter-hegemonic positions to plural hegemonies

Abstract: Can artistic and cultural practices play a critical role in societies in which criticisms are reflexively absorbed and immobilised by the prevailing hegemony? And, if yes, what kind of political order can they aspire to, given the ‘post-utopian’ nature of the human condition? How do we approach the tortuous question of the destiny of both the project of modern democracy and that of aesthetic modernity? There is no agreement on this issue. We are told that there is no alternative to the existing liberal democracy and capitalist pluralism without risking yet another dystopia – the dilemma that in the artistic realm is sometimes articulated as the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. What might progressive art look like in such times when the ideas of progress and modernity are viewed with great suspicion? The most popular positions concerning artistic and cultural practices’ critical dimension revolve around the idea that with the post-Fordist transformation and the bankruptcy of the Left, the paradigm of power has really changed. This is reflected in the radical character of contemporary artistic practices, which desperately struggle to constitute subject at the expense of themselves. However, the question is: can these practices be both radical and democratic? This depends on our understanding of emancipatory politics, the nature of aesthetics and post-Fordist transformation. We will examine the different approaches to these subjects influenced by the Frankfurt school and post-Operaist theories to argue that neither Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkeimer’s analyses based on the Fordist model, nor Antonio Negri’s and Paolo Virno’s post-Fordist appropriation of the significance of art in the new forms of production provide a useful framework with which to grasp the nature of the changes and challenges that face our society. Such novel ideas as ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘spontaneous communism’ or exodus and ‘communism of capital’, despite their new vocabulary, are a dangerous inversion of the Frankfurt school’s idealism and inability to grasp that social reality is hegemonically constructed through the practices of articulation that temporarily and incompletely ‘fix’ the meaning of social institutions. Neither politics nor post-Fordism should be considered through the matrix of culture, but in terms of hegemony. What is at issue is to grasp the nature of the democratic and aesthetical paradoxes and envisage how the two could be applied to contribute to progressive changes in power relations. Judgements must be made – we have to be able to distinguish between who belongs to demos and who does not; however, how we judge, which is the subject of aesthetic critique, is at the core of democratic artistic-political practice. One way in which artistic practices can be critical is a counter-hegemonic intervention that acts against the position of supremacy of any hegemonic order and shows that any fullness exists because there are gaps, but judges this lack in a way that resists the totalisation of the sensible. However, perhaps the way to weaken the centre is not just to expose its flaws, but to pluralise hegemonies. In this way, the idea to pluralise modernism in the era of globalisation could help us to redefine modern democracy in the post-political era and outline the positive vision of the ‘hegemonic trap’. Could the evolution of artistic-political practice be envisaged as the radicalisation of ‘oppositional identities’, which undermine the hegemonic forms of subject articulation into compository or shimmering identities, making such supremacy impossible? Can art become a symbol of emptying ‘democracy’ and thus construct many ‘democracies’, answering our tortuous question by producing plural answers?