Defined by a hollow: essays on utopia, science fiction and political epistemology
In: Ralahine utopian studies 6
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In: Ralahine utopian studies 6
In: Biblioteka Filozofska istraživanja 130
Engl. Zsfassung
In: Utopian studies, Volume 34, Issue 2, p. 292-311
ISSN: 2154-9648
ABSTRACT
This article refurbishes the view of antiutopianism as the ruling orthodoxy of late-capitalist common sense (pragmatics) and writings plus media (narrative). After a half-century descent into a contemporary neofeudalism (Fascism 2.0), the operation of totalized antiutopianism on utopian narrative genres is powerfully evident in the TV series Game of Thrones, a rigidly Social Darwinist fantasy world, reveling in mass slaughters and presupposing neofeudalism: a black fable for lesioned personalities.
In: Utopian studies, Volume 32, Issue 1, p. 1-35
ISSN: 2154-9648
ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions, Angelika Bammer cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker Adrienne Rich: "We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth … the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. … Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed." Based on sustaining, consoling, and radically altering the present dire state of human existence, the author leads to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are We (in general), and What Are We (in particular) Doing Wrong. What follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps representative beyond themselves.
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 34, Issue 2-3, p. 239-249
ISSN: 1745-2635
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 34, Issue 2-3, p. 181-211
ISSN: 1745-2635
In: Historical materialism: research in critical marxist theory, Volume 28, Issue 3, p. 167-195
ISSN: 1569-206X
Abstract
Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was 'simultaneously dominator and dominated' (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – 'the Winston story', the 'Goldstein excerpts', and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, 'Tory anarchist' stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell's view there are 'three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low', but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. 'No economics' entails here 'no class struggle', and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell's textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable 'totalitarianism'. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom.
In: Japanese Slavic and East European studies, Volume 40, Issue 0, p. 24-29
ISSN: 0389-1186
In: Japanese Slavic and East European studies, Volume 40, Issue 0, p. 2-23
ISSN: 0389-1186
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 32, Issue 1, p. 54-77
ISSN: 1745-2635
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 30, Issue 1, p. 105-127
ISSN: 1745-2635
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 29, Issue 2, p. 91-98
ISSN: 1745-2635
In: Debatte: review of contemporary German affairs, Volume 21, Issue 2-3, p. 279-311
ISSN: 1469-3712
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 27, Issue 1, p. 161-189
ISSN: 1745-2635
In: Socialism and democracy: the bulletin of the Research Group on Socialism and Democracy, Volume 26, Issue 2, p. 91-106
ISSN: 1745-2635