A question which comes to mind and which I don't think we canvas on the course is this: what about Australia utopianism? What utopian social dreams and or nightmares bear the little kangaroo in a triangle?
Looking at the city of Sydney from a distance -- I'm thinking from my home, far north -- and at night makes it look like an un/hyper-real non-place, floating on the horizon. For me this is social dreaming at its best: if, as Jameson claims, utopian visions include those of the past, and modify and correct them, should the same apply to our geography? Does this mean that, due to uneven development, Australia has what we might call temporal geography or, rather, geographical temporality? What are the utopian times and spaces in Australia, our island about a non-existent sea?
Woop Woop! The Black Stump (and its beyond)! The Gold Coast!
These vague questions brought to you by the letter A, Steve Muecke's No Road (Bitumen All the Way), my being sick of thesis, and the concept of teleology (a favorite, I hear).
Peace out, cool cats.
Imagining the Great Southern Land: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction
Convenor: Professor Andrew Milner
The three panel members are co-investigators in a Discovery Project, Imagining the Great Southern Land: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, which has been funded by the ARC with $A 185,711 in 2007, $A 196,065 in 2008 and $A 178,317 in 2009. Their project is a critical-historical appraisal of utopianism in Australian literature, architecture and popular culture (especially science fiction). It examines the ways Australia has been used as the setting, and sometimes as the inspiration, for imaginings of a significantly better or worse society than that in which the authors lived. Its special academic significance is in its use of a wide range of disciplinary approaches to analyse the specificity of Australian utopian traditions. This kind of interdisciplinarity was precisely what was intended by the early founders of Cultural Studies (Hoggart, Thompson, Williams). The panel will address the findings of the research project, especially what they show about how Australian utopian traditions were shaped by, and in turn helped to shape, real political and social developments.
Contributors
Professor Ian Buchanan
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical Theory at Cardiff University. He is a former President of the CSAA and Partner Investigator for the Imagining the Great Southern Land project. His recent publications include Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006) and Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007).
Professor Verity Burgmann
Verity Burgmann is Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne. She is Chief Investigator for the Imagining the Great Southern Land project. Her recent publications include Unions and the Environment (2002) and Power, Profit and Protest: Australian Social Movements and Globalisation (2003).
Professor Andrew Milner
Andrew Milner is Professor of Cultural Studies at Monash University. He is principal Chief Investigator for the Imagining the Great Southern Land project. His recent publications include Literature, Culture and Society (2005) and Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia (2007).
2 comments:
It must have been Jenn with the Mad Max citation :)
I have been reading the work of late-structuralist literary theorist Darko Suvin, and he has some interesting things to say about one common theme in all early utopian texts: whether they embody a liberal or conservative authoritarian politic and ideology, and whether they embody a mythologising/mystic religio-morally inspired world like More's or a naturalistically inspired alternative reality - they all exhibit some significant heirarchical or other type of structure, wherein order and systemic immutability are seen as necessary for utopian outcomes(1.) Later theorists like James identify a mid to late 20th century shift in the conception of immutable and putatively perfect social structures as oppressive and dystopian, and lacking in the dynamism of scientia and the scientific worldview which adjusts its structures and perspectives depending on empirical scientific findings(2.) In his essay about postmodern space, Murphett discusses the 'world-city' - globally interconnected by technology and boasting high levels of cultural diversity, but diluted admixed normalised culture - wherein space is partitioned along multifarious cultural, economical, political, ideological and racial lines, and where the aspiring utopian gated commnity co-exists beside the dytopian ghetto. In terms of an Australian utopia - perhaps we could note at least the following:
- There is a lot of open physical space in Australia
- Melbourne was originally intended and built as the quintessential rectilinear modernist city.
- Canberra was also devised according to an orderly ideal - although not as 'square' (the bunker format of parliament house and the historical military strategic import of Canberras location perhaps speak more of cold-war dytopian themes)
- Sydney grew organically out from its early origins as a penal settlement into a highly centralised metroplitan core surrounded by a sprawling, heterogeneous admixture of industrial infrastructure and suburban habitat.
-Both Melbourne and Sydney are amoung the top 40 cities city in the world for land area (http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-area-125.html)
-The original indigenous population of Australia is no longer distributed as evenly as it used to be, and indigenous Australians exist in the majority only in smaller communities far from these major centres (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/Social_Justice/statistics/index.html).
If Australia is aspiringly utopian in the ideological sense, then it is hardly by virtue of the equitable distribution of wealth, power and rights. Perhaps the authoritarian and conservative model cited by Suvin and implemented literarily by More is closer to the mark aspirationally speaking. Clearly there is a wealth of material for the utopian and dytopian fictive treatment of Australia’s present, past and future – but I’d have to say that I’m voting dystopian, and if I wrote an Australian novel it would be more Stephenson-esque than not, although Max never ordered pizza.
That there are many parts of the world - including in Australia - that one could visit and expect to have an experience of reality mirroring fiction, and be confronted by the landscape and personalities faced by the leather pants wearing sawn-off shotgun wearing road warrior. Have fun in Kalgoorlie!
1. Suvin, D. Metamporphoses of Science Fiction, Yale: Yale University Press, 1980.
2. James, E. and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
3. Murphett, J. Postmodernism and Space, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200?
Does EVERYONE know about my obsession with Post Apocalypse :)
I am very interested in "ideal" urban spaces - particularly those like Canberra that are designed with a particulary civic function in mind, but take time to become "authentic" places. I am particularly thinking about the theory of a Geographer named Relph here and the idea of 'placelessness' - places that appear to be ideal, but perhaps have not had enough time to establish themselves as a spatial location that people connect with in a personal and subjective (or collective and cultural) way.
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