Arena Journal articles from September 2005

Arena Journal archives from September 2005

Meditations on the impossible.(Essay)
September 22, 2005... The word 'utopia' was coined by Thomas More in 1516, but recognizably utopian 'ideal states' had been staples of literary and philosophical imagining ever since antiquity: important examples included Plato's Republic and the Hebrew books of...

Fredric Jameson and anti-anti-Utopianism.(Part I: Archaeologies of the Future)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... In the following I want to give an account of Fredric Jameson's theory of Utopia as presented in Archaeologies of the Future. (1) Like Thomas More's Utopia, this is actually two books, the second written before the first, since the latter is...

Producing criticism as Utopia: Fredric Jameson and science fiction.(Part I: Archaeologies of the Future)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... This essay is an attempt at a meditation on the role of oppositional cultural criticism in a globalized world where all forms of opposition seem to be foreclosed by the non-existence of any strong form of otherness; a world in which, as...

Reading the Maps: realism, science fiction and Utopian strategies.(Part I: Archaeologies of the Future)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... For what is the task of the true philosophy if not to draw the archetypal map? Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel It is fair to assume that readers of this journal share at least a sympathy with Oscar Wilde's assertion that 'a...

Ideology and Utopia in the work of Fredric Jameson: or the counter-revolution in the revolution.(Part II: The Politics of Utopia)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... Ideology and Utopia Ideology and Utopia are intricately linked in Fredric Jameson's work. On the one hand, he calls upon marxists to 'reinvent Marxism as an Ideology, that is, as a vibrant, prophetic, Utopian call to a radical and systemic...

Archaeologies of anti-capitalist Utopianism.(Part II: The Politics of Utopia)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... The relationship between Utopia and the political, as well as questions about the practical-political value of Utopian thinking and the identification between socialism and Utopia, very much continue to be unresolved topics today, when Utopia...

Critiquing the violence of Guantanamo: resisting the monopolization of the future.(Part II: The Politics of Utopia)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... In his Critique of Violence Walter Benjamin attests to the impossibility of subordinating power to law by demonstrating that law is both founded and preserved by violence. Law therefore relies on the state's monopolization of the use of...

An un-original tale: Utopia denied in Enuma Elish.(Part II: The Politics of Utopia)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... If only Ernst Bloch had read Enuma Elish as part of his grand Principle of Hope. (1) But he didn't, preferring the Bible and Faustus as his great inspirations, and there is simply no sustained political reading of this myth. So I offer here...

(Not) by design: Utopian moments in the creation of Canberra.(Part III: Australian Utopias)(Report)
September 22, 2005... In an article from 2001 entitled 'Ecopolitics by Design', David Wright draws attention to the 'unique integration of political idealism and ecological thinking' that characterizes the work of Walter Burley Griffin as the principal architect of...

The Utopian imagination of Aboriginalism.(Part III: Australian Utopias)(Report)
September 22, 2005... From its very inception, utopian spatialization has not been kind to Indigenous people. (1) Anticipating a program of colonial violence in centuries to come, Thomas More's original utopian society is only founded after the conquest of a foreign...

The illusion of the future: notes on Benjamin and Freud.(Part IV: Utopian Theory)(Walter Benjamin, )(Report)
September 22, 2005... The future's inevitability makes it a matter of continual concern. (1) (A concern, more significantly, that is played out in divergent ways; a state of affairs already signalled by the interplay of the inevitable and the continuous.) If the...

The pure machine's gambit: Walter Benjamin's Thesis I.(Part IV: Utopian Theory)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... How can one think of the future? This question will of necessity remain indeterminate if it is taken as asking what a thinking subject imagines will take place in the future. There are no restrictions in what one is allowed to imagine....

The Utopian dimension of thought in Deleuze and Guattari.(Part IV: Utopian Theory)(Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Felix Guattari)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... It is no small irony that two of the most remarkable recent renewals of utopian thinking would find inspiration in a version of universal history--the one propounded by Deleuze and Guattari in their first collaboration, Anti-Oedipus--that...

'Tragic utopianism' and critique in Raymond Williams.(Part IV: Utopian Theory)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... Preamble In a 1992 review essay Fredric Jameson noted that one of the peculiarities of the promotion of the cultural studies project was the neglect of Raymond Williams' sociological and political vision and that leading such revisionism...

From Herland to Outland: changing anatomies of gender dystopia.(Part V: Future Fictions)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... I do not know where to begin. The birth of each page suggests its end, an anatomy of discovery and desire. To begin is to think already of an ending, the knell of silence, to presage the kind of closure found in written stories, at least the...

Three French futures: Australia, Antartica and Ailleurs.(Part V: Future Fictions)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... Towards the end of 2005, the international spotlight was focused on France, exposing images of burning cars, bombs in the banlieues, curfews and convictions in the land of 'Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite'. (1) The outbreak of three weeks of...

Margaret Atwood, Doughnut Holes, and the paradox of imagining.(Part V: Future Fictions)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... The questions have been asked: 'Can the future be imagined?'; 'If so, how?' The answer to the first of these is deceptively simple. It would seem to be an unequivocal 'yes'. If we take, for example, just the history of the future novel, then...

Science fiction as historical novel: Michel Houellebecq's les particules elementaires.(Part V: Future Fictions)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... Revolutions are thus the great periods of [hu]mankind because in and through them such rapid upward movements of human capacities become widespread. (1) Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel. This article offers a...

Framing catastrophe: the problem of ending in dystopian fiction.(Part V: Future Fictions)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2005... Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most famous of all English-language dystopias. (1) And we all know how it ends: 'But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big...

Eutopias and dystopias of science.(Part VI: Bibliographical Essay)(Essay)
September 22, 2005... Most utopias are based upon one or more foundations, with education, law and religion being the most common, with of course interesting shifts in dominance over time. * Here, I look at another or, arguably, two others: science and technology....