Summary
There will be many Utopias. (Wells 1994: 220)
ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. (Eggers 2013: 67)
What does a baby computer call its father? … Data. (Jonze 2013)
The twenty-first century has not begun well. H. G. Wells in the quotation above argues at the beginning of the twentieth century for a world that places freedom at its core and envisions never-ending technological and creative advances constructing a modern utopia. A century later Michael Marder and Patrícia Vieira introduce the collection Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thinking with an almost despairing cry:
Is there still any space, whether conceptual or practical, for the thinking of utopia – which from the outset announces a certain negation of place, topos – in a world marked by a chronic dystopian outlook? After more than a hundred years of what Nietzsche first diagnosed as ‘European nihilism’, dystopia has now firmly established itself as the current Weltanschauung, a lens through which we filter reality. In the West, the sense that all viable alternatives for a different organization have been exhausted led to widespread voter apathy, resignation and nonparticipation in the political sphere. Aesthetically, this dystopian mood has given rise to countless novels and films, the most emblematic of which is perhaps George Orwell's 1984. (Marder and Vieira 2012: ix)
An almost despairing cry, because the new perspectives on utopian thinking promised in the title indicate that such thinking has not disappeared, and indeed might be useful and necessary in a world in which alternatives otherwise seem foreclosed. The label ‘existential utopia’ admits the need for grounded proposals that take account of realities while offering imaginative and progressive options, Robert Albritton describing his contribution as ‘A Practical Utopia for the Twenty-First Century’ (141–56). Typically, Marder and Vieira rate Nineteen Eighty-Four as symptomatic of this chronic dystopian outlook. Chapter 3, however, argues that Orwell's novel need not be dismissed as a purely negative and despair-inducing text. In terms of its depiction of surveillance, the novel presents a more variegated representation than is often acknowledged, and its warning against the excesses of state (and by extension, commercial) monitoring has made it an important activator of public and academic awareness on the topic.
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- Imagining SurveillanceEutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film, pp. 155 - 171Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015