Academic literature on the topic 'Utopian Persistence'

The theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized (relatively speaking) by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. Compelled to answer to Marx’s denigration of utopia as fantasy, the tendency was (still is, for many) to compensate for the absence of a programmatic politics by stressing what is “useful” about utopian dreaming, and therefore where or how exactly a utopian text reveals or creates political drive, or motivates political action. In this essay, I argue that theorists have overlooked the use of utopia as not only the reproduction of difference, or what Malabou calls positive plasticity, but also as, therefore, a disruption; Malabou might prefer the term accident here. Tracing the concept of plasticity from Roland Barthes to Malabou, with a nod at Miguel Abensour, this essay teases out the links between a contemporary notion of plasticity to argue, simply put, that utopia is plastic. This plasticity of the concept ensures its political force. These links, obscured in the essay “Plastic,” Barthes makes only later in his writing. But for Malabou, plasticity underlies a principle of futurity and/as generativity, such that new forms, new meanings, new concepts emerge through difference. Utopia’s horizons of potentiality depend on difference, and on non-achievement. Finally, I argue that the persistence of utopia (Abensour) as a form of thinking is the most important, and political, effect of utopian plasticity.

‘The characteristic feature of the crisis of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 was the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a Utopia which took little account of reality to a reality from which every element of Utopia was rigorously excluded… The Utopia of 1919 was hollow and without substance,’ So wrote E. H. Carr in the conclusion to his Twenty Years Crisis, which he sent to the press in the middle of July 1939. Fifty years later one cannot but agree with him that the peace settlement of 1919 ‘failed’: Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin wiped it off the map of Europe. But though the Second World War created a very different ‘realistic’ world, some of the ‘Utopian’ ideals of 1919, so brusquely dismissed by Carr, re-surfaced irrepressibly after 1945, and some of their practical applications returned to the agenda of international politics.

Utopias of the text are the moments of the emergence of a new and radical concept of the text as overflowing all limits and boundaries. Here these utopias are traced in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. They often emerge at the margins of these texts, in fragments or boundaries at which the utopia can be glimpsed before disappearing. These utopian moments can be reconstructed as a form of thinking the post-literary and its limits. They can also be traced to the explosion of speech during May 1968 and Maurice Blanchot is a key figure who links together this political moment with the ‘neutral’ form of writing. This article explores the fading of these utopias of the text alongside this draining of political energies. These processes of critique and waning suggest the inversion of utopias of the text into dystopias of the text. Now the sign or signifier appears dispersed or even insignificant compared to the powers and forces of post-literary domination. In this situation, however, the article suggests, the persistence of the utopias of the text as a critical horizon that can still inform how we grasp the equivocations of our post-literary moment.

PERSISTENT UTOPIA | Persistent utopia is not to be confused with the conservative notion of an eternal utopia as a static and authoritarian ideal. Rather, persistent utopia is an impulse towards freedom and justice. It is a fragile phenomenon which is seeking to avoid the closure of reality through a constant displacement. The sites of the persistent utopia can be located at two different levels: through the ontological thinking of Ernst Bloch and through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas which takes the encounter as its point of departure. The present forms of the persistence of utopia can be seen, e.g., in the “new utopian spirit” as a responseto the dialectics of emancipation, and in the relation between utopia and democracy.

Resilience is a requirement for a modern-day academic citizen. This essay discusses the sources of academic resilience and its costs through personal reflection. The text positions academic citizenship among intersecting lifeworlds and ends up with a recognition of posthumanist ethic as a source of resilience. The vision for the academic citizen is neither utopian nor dystopian but thrutopian. Academic resilience is persistence to muddle through hardships, drawing power from the anxiety of neoliberal academia in a multicrisis world. The keyboard is our tool for crafting better futures, and the love for writing must be salvaged repeatedly from the paralyzing anxiety that has little in common with academic procrastination memes.

This paper focuses on three narratives from the popular press during the boom in apocalyptic literature at the turn of the twentieth century: George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894), Robert Barr’s “Within an Ace of the End of the World” (1900), and M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). In all three texts, a catastrophic event causes the near extinction of humanity, and the event is inscribed in a religious narrative wherein humanity’s moral failings justify the cataclysm. In these texts, the survivors are European or descended from Europeans, such that post-apocalyptic humanity is exclusively White; all racial Others are depicted as unworthy of divine protection, or even as worthy of divine destruction. The survivors of these disasters fuse social Darwinism and theology to present themselves as racially superior and thus divinely favoured, compared to the deceased. The providential genocide significantly alters ethical ramifications by ensuring that racial elimination does not occur because of deliberate actions on the part of characters, sparing them from any culpability; instead, racial cleansing is presented as God’s will. This sets up a White exclusivist racial utopia free of moral stain, although the persistence of racial ideology into the apocalypse can undermine the utopian sentiment.

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.

An academic scientist’s professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation. Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive—getting it right—competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive—getting it published. This article develops strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and biases.

À la marge de la révolution numérique, inconnu·es du grand public, des bénévoles continuent depuis trente ans, d’administrer et de fournir des services internet non lucratifs. Ces associations, parfois très anciennes, cherchent à faire vivre l’utopie organisationnelle qui remonte aux débuts du réseau et les valeurs qui s’y rattachent. Mais qu’est-ce qui pousse encore des bénévoles à défendre cette cause perdue ? Quelle fonction remplit leur engagement ? Comment le situer dans l’évolution d’internet ces trente dernières années ?Cette thèse propose une analyse sociologique de la « pratique utopique » et des conditions de sa « rémanence » à partir d’une enquête comparée entre la France et l’Allemagne, croisant ethnographie et travail d’archives. Grâce à la perspective de l’analyse configurationnelle empruntée à Norbert Elias, on expliquera comment la capacité conservatrice et adaptative de ce mouvement associatif répond aux frustrations relatives des déçu·es de la révolution numérique, en croisant les niveaux d’analyse structurel, organisationnel et individuel.La thèse commence par retracer la sociogenèse de l’internet associatif dans les années 1990, entre pratiques pionnières, marginalisation économique et insertion discrète dans les politiques publiques locales de la connexion. C’est dans les années 2000 que l’activité associative s’est « utopisée », sous l’action d’« entrepreneurs d’utopie », à la marge de l’espace du militantisme pour la défense des droits et libertés numériques alors émergent. Ensuite, sur le plan organisationnel, la thèse montre comment les associations de l’internet ont été travaillées de l’intérieur par les vagues successives de bénévoles investissant, en fonction de leurs socialisations propres à internet, un sens de la cause et un modèle d’organisation correspondant.Enfin, sur le plan individuel, grâce à une division du travail utopique permettant d’exercer autrement son métier, l’engagement dans ces associations a comporté des rétributions tant pour les pionniers que pour les bénévoles plus tardifs. Trait d’union entre des socialisations alternatives constituantes du rapport à l’apprentissage, désir d’autonomie, de liberté et de sécurité, les associations créent les conditions d’une utopie individuelle pour ceux, et plus rarement celles, qui parviennent à s’y intégrer, compensant les rapports de force dont ils et elles font par ailleurs l’expérience au travail.Ainsi, tout en organisant la conservation de pratiques pré-marchandes de collaborationentre pairs, l’internet associatif offre des voies de transformations à ses adeptes, notamment sur le plan du rapport individuel et collectif à l’activité. La comparaison permet de saisir quant à elle les contours d’une utopie internet européenne et ce que la diversité des pratiques utopiques doit aux structures nationales de pouvoir, notamment en matière de régulation du marché des télécommunications. Au-delà d’une perspective normative voyant dans l’utopie en société un facteur de changement univoque ou un système d’idées opposé aux fictions conservatrices, tourné vers une société meilleure, cette thèse entend contribuer à la compréhension sociologique des phénomènes utopiques à partir des logiques pratiques
On the fringes of the digital revolution, unknown to the general public, volunteers have been administering and providing non-profit Internet services for thirty years. These associations, some of them very old, are trying to keep alive the organisational utopia that dates back to the beginnings of the network and the values associated with it. But what is it that still drives volunteers to defend this lost cause? What function does their commitment fulfil? And how does it fit into the evolution of the internet over the last thirty years?This thesis offers a sociological analysis of the “utopian practice” and the conditions of its persistence, based on a comparative survey between France and Germany combining ethnography and archival work. Using the perspective of configuration analysis borrowed from Norbert Elias, we will explain how the conservative and adaptive capacity of this associative movement responds to the relative frustrations of those disappointed by the digital revolution, by crossing structural, organisational and individual levels of analysis.The thesis begins by tracing the sociogenesis of the associative Internet in the 1990s, between pioneering practices, economic marginalisation and discreet insertion into local public connection policies. It was in the 2000s that associative activity became ‘utopian’, through the actions of ‘utopian entrepreneurs’, on the fringes of the then emerging activism in defence of digital rights and freedoms. Secondly, the thesis shows, from an organisational point of view, how Internet associations were shaped from the inside by successive waves of volunteers who, according to their own socialisation on the Internet, invested in a sense of the cause and a corresponding organisational model. Finally, on an individual level, thanks to a utopian division of labour that enabled people to practise their profession in a different way, we will explain how involvement in these associations was rewarded for pioneers and later volunteers alike. As a link between the alternative socialisations that make up the relationship to learning, the desire for autonomy, freedom and security, the associations create the conditions for an individual utopia for those who manage to join them, compensating for the power relationships they experience at work.So, while organising the preservation of pre-market practices of collaboration between peers, the associative internet offers its followers avenues of transformation, particularly regarding the individual and collective relationship to activity. The comparison enables us to grasp the contours of a European Internet utopia and what the diversity of utopian practices owes to national power structures, particularly regarding regulation of the telecommunications market. Beyond a normative perspective that sees utopia in society as a factor for unambiguous change, or as a system of ideas opposing conservative fictions and geared towards a better society, this thesis aims to contribute to a sociological understanding of utopian phenomena based on an analysis of their logical practices

This chapter considers Serge Daney’s transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated with the possibilities of the small screen and status of cinema as an old medium. Daney challenges foundational film theory and introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s he chronicled the experience of watching cinema on television and engaged in a process of “archaeology” focused on absent or damaged images rather than the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Daney’s work at the threshold between media provides a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it questions both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding new media. Daney instead constructs a retrospective theory of film that reveals its diminution over time and the persistence of its utopian ambitions.

This chapter concludes the book, relating the observations in the history of international legal thought to the current crisis of the international legal system. It highlights the persistence of optimism as a moral duty and calls for continuous efforts to reconcile realism and utopia.

As climate change and a pandemic pose enormous challenges to humankind, the concept of expert governance gains new traction. This book revisits the idea that scientists, bureaucrats, and lawyers, rather than politicians or diplomats, should manage international relations. It shows that this technocratic approach has been a persistent theme in writings about international relations, both academic and policy-oriented, since the 19th century. The technocratic tradition of international thought unfolded in four phases which were closely related to domestic processes of modernization and rationalization. The pioneering phase lasted from the Congress of Vienna to the First World War. In these years, philosophers, law scholars, and early social scientists began to combine internationalism and ideals of expert governance. Between the two world wars, a utopian period followed that was marked by visions of technocratic international organizations that would have overcome the principle of territoriality. In the third phase, from the 1940s to the 1960s, technocracy became the dominant paradigm of international institution-building. That paradigm began to disintegrate from the 1970s onwards, but important elements remain until the present day. The specific promise of technocratic internationalism is its ability to transform violent and unpredictable international politics into orderly and competent public administration. Such ideas also had political clout. This book shows how they left their mark on the League of Nations, the functional branches of the United Nations system, and the European integration project.

This chapter argues that the famous ‘Mannheim paradox’ regarding the ideological understanding of ideology in Ideology and Utopia merely serves as a preparation for a far more complex and persistent paradox that poses a recurrent problem for any political science seeking to understand the relation of political ideologies to political reality: namely, when we try to understand contending political ideologies at any one historical moment and test them for their ‘congruence’ with historical and sociological ‘reality’, our construction of this context is itself informed by these ideologies or our partisan understanding of them. To deal with this paradox Mannheim suggests a new political science based on Marx and Weber. This political science seeks to construct fields of competing ideologies—such as conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—and play off the insight and blindness of each to create a momentary ‘synthesis’ of the relation between political ideas and a dynamic political reality.

Katta Spiel widmet sich in diesem Beitrag der Frage wie in einer Welt, in der Technologien oft dazu dienen, Behinderungen persistent als unbegehrliches Defizit zu konzeptualisieren, Technikentwicklung bestärkende Utopien, welche Bezug nehmen auf Körper und assistive Technologien, realisieren können. Konkret nutzt Spiel dazu Karen Barad's Artikel Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings (2015) um nachzuverfolgen, wie wir über Technologien spekulieren können, die behinderte Körper als Potentiale verstehen. Der spekulative Ansatz bietet Möglichkeiten zur positiven Verhandlung von behinderten Körpern und betrachtet sie als formbar und begehrlich - als ontologisch unbestimmt und transzendent.

This chapter examines the tension between utopian literary visions of a borderless Israel-Palestine and the increasing proliferation of borders in the region in two novels, Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal 1969 novella Returning to Haifa, and Sami Michael’s follow up to Kanafani’s work, Doves in Trafalgar (2005). Beginning with the notion of utopia as an antithesis to borders, this chapter traces a shift from Kanafani’s earlier work, which uses the Palestinian protagonist’s border crossing and return to his lost home as a galvanizing moment of renewed commitment to the utopian vision of Palestinian resistance, to Michael’s later novel, in which the border’s persistence and expansion produces the failure of a utopian vision of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. In this reading, borders function as post-utopian spaces that signify the decline of certain political ideologies and commitments in both Palestinian and Israeli literature.

San Francisco’s Exploratorium, founded in 1968, embodied a utopian vision of scientific thought. Its founder, Frank Oppenheimer, was a Peter Pan figure who helped publicize the museum’s image as a place where children and adults could escape the worries of modern life and return to the joys of pure perception. This chapter argues that the Exploratorium self-consciously stood as an alternative to a career-minded, nationalistic model of science education.

This is the first Chapter of the second section of the book, which focuses on Kafkaesque films which respond to fascism and its legacies. The Chapter opens with a brief analysis of the crisis and delegitimization of anti-fascist historiography in film studies and the Humanities as a whole; it suggests that the tendency to commemorate the victims of the fascist past tends at times to neglect their political struggles and/or utopian visions. I then close-read two films directed by Fernando Arrabal, who is largely known for his pioneering work in the theatre. Drawing on scholarship on multimedia modernism by Julian Murphet, Laura Marcus and David Trotter, I discuss Arrabal’s multimedia aesthetic in his novel Baal Babylone (Baal Babylon, 1959) and its transposition to film. This is followed by an analysis of The L'arbre de Guernica (The Tree of Guernica, 1975) as a film that brings together the Kafkaesque and Artaudian aesthetic as also manifested in Arrabal’s panic theatre work.

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.

This chapter treats the Bolshevik revolution and first years of the Soviet regime as the final chapter of the émigré saga. It follows the alumni of the colonies as they returned to the colonies after the February 1917 revolution and examines how their experiences abroad influenced their later actions. The chapter shows how the Bolsheviks used the exile tradition of living the revolution and the close relationships they had formed abroad to consolidate their power. At the same time, it argues that longstanding antipathies imported from Europe intensified revolutionary violence, and that rival interpretations of what it meant to live the revolution advanced by other parties posed persistent challenges to Bolshevik hegemony.

Abstract Here we can see Hawthorne carried from bemusement to disgust by the inscription of his own thought. His grimace at the appalling spectacle of all those form of rule from the grave was echoed many times in the nineteenth century; it became characteristic of the age: as Marx said, the past weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Although many intellectuals demurred, pro gressivism was powerful enough in that century to make many think that the hold of the past was all that kept humankind from true fulfillment. Scientism was in flower; railroads, Crystal Pal aces, electoral reform, and the like gave the more hopeful cause to believe in a new meaning for the term Utopia

The Coda considers how the book’s historical critique of modernist verticality can help us develop more nuanced ways of rethinking more current discourses of the horizontal imagination, including decades-old arguments about the “depthlessness,” “shallowness,” and “groundlessness” of contemporary culture as well as the rhetoric of horizontal flows, digital utopias, and the global commons. In particular, it calls for further recognition of the growing ecological crisis and the persistence of social stratification and uneven development despite calls for “flat” conceptions of the social. It concludes by arguing that a more multi-layered and multi-dimensional understanding of the past and the future may be necessary for confronting the challenges of the present.

Weeksville was founded in 1838 by formerly enslaved persons and freedmen who sought to create a self-sustaining utopian community in Brooklyn, New York. Distinguished by its urbanity, size, and relative physical and economic stability, the community provided sanctuary for self-emancipated persons from Southern slave plantations, and for free Black people escaping the violence of New York City’s Draft Riots in 1863. The second largest African American community in the U.S. was absorbed by the forces of real estate development in New York City. After almost fifty years of community led persistence and vision, in 2014 the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) introduced a new Cultural Arts Building and interpretive landscape on the same campus as the original community. “Connecting to the Archive: Counter-Gentrification Tactics in Central Brooklyn,” strengthens community development activities as a counterforce to gentrification through several processes that center around the ongoing development of archival and oral history collections held by the Center. Through academic partnership with Pratt Institute in the Pratt Weeksville Archive students and faculty work together with the Center’s staff and community members on the ongoing archiving project, which seeks to support the Center’s efforts to preserve and add to the archive, provide access to, and interpret the archival microhistory of community development and documentation activities that led to the formation of the Society and its growth. Historic Black nineteenth century self-supporting communities can become a model for empowerment in twenty first century shrinking Black communities rendered apolitical and ahistorical and little hope for a future. Central Brooklyn is arguably the largest African American community in the U.S., with a population that is shrinking in numbers due to white gentrification and beset by the traumas caused by anti-Black racism, generational displacement and poor access to public services. To assist in this effort, the project engages with local residents in oral history and critical ethnography practices so as to decentered the privileged position of the ethnographer. Based on the multidimensional method of Edgar Morin and everyday life practitioners, the goal is to empower residents to utilize the archive through interviewing, self-documentation, storytelling, and appreciation of archival and oral history methodologies. The project connects the Center to its immediate community and the immediate community to the Center through the effort to document the memory and experience of the neighborhood in the past, present, and future, to engage with and expand the archival collections held at the Center so as to create a place of refuge, delight and individual and collective history as a counterforce to the forces of global neoliberalism that continue to degrade, marginalize and challenge BIPOC community building.

Abstract The avant-garde inclinations in the socio-political and cultural milieu of Yugoslav socialism postulated the concept of synthesis as the central theme in architecture and visual arts. This was facilitated by the critique of functionalist and formal concepts and by promoting ideas of organic systems that balance natural and built environments and are unsustainable outside the context of integrity. Vjenceslav Richter was probably the most persistent in developing the concept of synthesis among Yugoslav architects, proposing a global, holistic and systematic approach. In the early 1960s, Richter used experimental models to explore spatial-plastic relations, which led to the development of the concept that provided synthetic solutions for urban functions – synthurbanism. Richter’s theory of the organisation of living synthesis was rooted in the key concepts of socialist society – harmonious relations between individuals and the collective and human as an integrated biological and social being. The premise of this study is that the original ideological agenda of Yugoslav Socialism based on the values of Marxist humanism provided a comprehensive social and philosophical context for the concept of synthesis.This study aims to describe a broader context of synthetic thought in Yugoslav society through the architectural and urbanistic ideas of Vjenceslav Richter. His utopian model is based on the premise that the environment represents a system of intertwined functions and that living space and humans are integrated into interactive processes, which show functional correlativeness in achieving sustainable urban living. Keywords: synthesis, synthurbanism, Vjenceslav Richter, Marxism, self-management socialism