Monday, January 12, 2009

Utopia as... and then expectations etc

Utopia as a social reality to individual perception
Utopia as an imaginary enclave within a real social space..a result of social and spacial differentiation (eco issues / history issues)
Utopia as an attempt to alleviate and eliminate sources of exploitation and suffering
Utopia as a rhetorical response to a social situation (a motivated creation)
Utopias are not necessarily “rose gardens”
Utopia as priviledging the communal over the I (collective narcissism)
Utopia and intertextuality
Utopia as structurally ambiguous
Socialism / Communism Utopian imperialism

Utopia’s privileging of reason/ good will / free flow of information/ harmony(balance), satisfaction/freedom, communal interest, homogeny (red alert!)

Utopia as anti-nature – the stunting of man’s innate desire to grow
Utopia as static
Utopia as technology /evolution (of man’s and the environment’s “nature”)

Utopia as systemic (hence its relation to marginalized (social) discourses)
What does it mean to rail against the “system”? Communal railing
Utopia as counter hegemonic.
Utopia – emphasis on common origin (ontology/epistemology/first principles)
Utopia as a normative (rule bound) nature of existence in actio

Just b/c the norms /rules/conventions are not stated explicitly does not imply a created reality is not still in place hence, there is NEVER an absence of paradigms within utopia / distopia / anti-topia discourse (50)
Utopia as critical engagement – re-evaluation

Utopia as an social interruption
Utopia as joint relationship b/n writer and reader both involved with the creative process

“utopia in other words, informs…the “quest for counter-space” that enables humanity to change ‘life itself’” (65)

Utopia as “counter public sphere”

Utopia as postmodernism - as a reaction against modernism's heirarchies of social arrangements, including: identity/history and culture.

Expectation:
I expect that we will not be completely consumed, in our studying of utopias/dystopias/anti-topias, by the "always already" arguments.

What'd I'd like get out of the class:

I'd like to explore the arrangement within public space as topias to see where that road lands me.

In addition, I see myself potentially exploring the idea of topias present within the sci-fi manga movies Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina by Shinji Aramaki.

Finally, I want to gear what I learn in this class toward supplementing my interest in the issue of system generated knowledge of/about "truth"...(i'm thinking coherence theory here as presented by Alcoff in her text - real knowing...new versions of the coherence theory )