Suchergebnisse

Locative media uses portable, networked, location aware computing devices for user-led mapping and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes its canvas. The discourse of locative media gestures to a convergence of the digital domain and geographical space, and the course it plots towards this future demands not only that data be made geographically specific but also that the user - if not defined by their location - at least offers up their location as a condition of entering the game. In this respect, not to mention its choice of tools, locative media operates upon the same plane as military tracking, State and commercial surveillance, forcing a consideration of how locative media might challenge, or be complicit with such forms of social control.

Dystopia, just as utopia, has always been immersed in political visions: utopia ‎as an ideal society and dystopia as its opposite: 'bad place' – a futuristic, usually ‎very near future, an imagined universe in which oppressive social control ‎rules. However, utopia and dystopia cannot be absolutely separated, there is‎ a constant threat of replacing good place by bad place, very often leading to‎ the conclusion that every utopia either leads to dystopia or already is dystopia.‎ Today, it often seems that the dystopian future has already arrived, the reality ‎itself evokes dystopian imagination: the global warming and the catastrophes, ‎the monstrous underside of various technologies that would ultimately over-power‎ us – humans. Furthermore, both utopia and dystopia are narratives about ‎how to govern the commons. Whereas in the past the commons appeared in ‎different utopian visions of good governing, today most often the commons ‎fleshes out in disfigured forms of dystopian narratives. In this essay I analyze ‎dystopian imagination as a traumatic symptom of the commons, expressed in‎different narratives of the crisis of capitalism (the Anthropocene, the global‎ monsters, the uncanny weather, metaverse, neo- or techno-feudalism).‎

The first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia: redefining the central concepts and chronology of the genre, and offering a theoretical overview and prehistory of the concept; an account of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes as dystopias; and a brief history of the literary dystopia from the early nineteenth century to the present

This is the corrected version of the retracted article under the same title, which was published with the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.2817.
In this article, I argue that dystopia also has an ambivalently "active" function in Bauman's sociology. Across his work, as a counter-image to the "active utopia" of socialism, the traces of the "active dystopia" can be tracked, defined as a pointed elucidation of the possibilities for barbarism latent within the present, the clearest expression of which is presented in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). The article proceeds roughly in three steps. Firstly, I revisit the arguments in Bauman's foundational cultural and critical sociology that developed alongside his revisionist reading of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, on epistemologies of the future, common sense and the limitations of the predictive ambitions of social science. Then, I develop a particular focus on an unpublished, though essential, typescript entitled "Is the Science of the Possible Possible?", suggesting that it is usefully read in terms of the emphasis on possibility and potentiality in Modernity and the Holocaust. Throughout these sections, I intersperse a reading of Modernity and the Holocaust in the light of this foundational work, presenting it as an exemplary form of critical sociology as active dystopia, which elucidates the possibility for barbarism residing within modern societies. Finally, I consider how his thinking situates him in a lineage of critical thought animated by the "active dystopia", arguing that what is often mistaken for gloominess and pessimism is, in fact, a crucial resource for sociology in its speculative imagination of possible futures.

This book presents an extended account of the language of dystopia, exploring the creativity and style of dystopian narratives and mapping the development of the genre from its early origins through to contemporary practice. Drawing upon stylistic, cognitive-poetic and narratological approaches, the work proposes a stylistic profile of dystopia, arguing for a reader-led discussion of genre that takes into account reader subjectivity and personal conceptualisations of prototypicality. In examining and identifying those aspects of language that characterise dystopian narratives and the experience of reading dystopian fictions, the work discusses in particular the manipulation and construction of dystopian languages, the conceptualisation of dystopian worlds, the reading of dystopian minds, the projection of dystopian ethics, the unreliability of dystopian refraction, and the evolution and hybridity of the dystopian genre. Jessica Norledge is part of the Applied English Team at the University of Nottingham, UK, where she teaches across Literary Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She specialises in the cognitive poetics of emotion and the language of dystopia, having published on the dystopian short story, dystopian epistolary, dystopian minds, and the experience of reading dystopian fiction.