P2P Utopia

[imomus]

Since the BBC is pondering using P2P networks to distribute its whole archive over the internet, I thought I'd start the ball rolling by offering you an mp3 of a recent In Our Time about Modernist Utopias. I thought this was a terrific discussion. Like most weekly BBC shows, though, it only stayed on the BBC's site until it was replaced by the next edition. So I'm hosting it, and I'm the only place it'll be hosted, at least until that truly utopian moment when the BBC makes its entire archive available. (Personally I'm looking forward to hearing Denis Donoghue's 1982 Reith Lectures The Arts Without Mystery again. Oh, and all the Radio 3 artist documentary features produced by Piers Plowright, with their BBC Radiophonic Workshop scores. Klee, Picasso, Valery, all rendered in sound by Malcolm Clarke.)

Anyway, here's the BBC's blurb about the Modernist Utopias edition of "In Our Time":

"I want to gather together about twenty souls," wrote D H Lawrence in 1915, "and sail away from this world of war and squalor and find a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go, and some real decency". Utopias were in the air in the first decades of the twentieth century and the literature of the period abounds with worlds of imagined escape, feminist utopias, technological nightmares and rich imaginings of the world as it could or should become. Many of the societies that writers like H G Wells created were meant seriously, as signposts to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weak are eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate. What was it about that era that brought forward so many imagined futures? How did utopias become the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984, and why are writers so much less likely to create a Utopia now?"

Contributors: John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and editor of The Faber Book of Utopias. Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Laura Marcus, Professor of English at the University of Sussex.

And here's the file. Modernist Utopias (mp3 file, 12MB)

Comments

[casca-2u.livejournal.com]

Many of the societies that writers like H G Wells created were meant seriously, as signposts to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weak are eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate.

Hmmm.... I do think HG Wells' utopia in the Time Machine was a horrible and rather unpleasant world of predatory Morlocks and preyed Eloi [god-like? elohim?]. Not so much an idealised world, but rather the horrific consequences of allowing the social conditions in Wells' time to continue and develop.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

...why are writers so much less likely to create a Utopia now?"

It seems like filmmakers are much more apt to address the idea of utopia or dystopia these days (though there's some good exceptions in books, like The Handmaid's Tale).

Brazil is my favorite example. And I hear they're remaking Logan's Run, which has a similar "False Eden on the outside, seemy underworld on the other" feel to The Time Machine, while we're on the topic.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd say there's a definite tie-in with Utopian ideals and industrialisation, which is why they were so appealing to the 19th and early 20th century mindset. That whole notion of a society that runs as smoothly as a piece of well-oiled machinery...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It seems like filmmakers are much more apt to address the idea of utopia or dystopia these days

Ah, but I wouldn't be so hasty grouping utopia and dystopia together. The whole point of utopia is that it's an ideal world, and expresses a belief that progress is possible. While it's currently fashionable to cast aspersions on the "naivete" of this idea, and to make dystopian films like I, Robot, nobody is optioning the film rights on William Morris' News From Nowhere (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MorNews.html), which genuinely tries to lay out an ideal society.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Personally, I would love to make a film of News From Nowhere. The style would be somewhere between the Straubs and Peter Greenaway. Very static, very beautiful, full of a clear-eyed optimism about the future.)

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Good point. I guess it's easier to be wary of totalizing ideas, even if they're meant for the betterment of society, given how the 20th century (or any century) and its obsession with ideology turned out.

But I'd agree that it takes more courage to be a visionary than to be a cynic. It's a lot easier to point out flaws than to draw a map.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

i was just going to recommend News from Nowhere (http://print.google.com/print?id=zutjk0zM67MC&lpg=1&dq=news+from+nowhere&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fclient%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26q%3Dnews%2Bfrom%2Bnowhere%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8&pg=0_1&printsec=0&sig=2997u9swS3EWSAsqG3Zm22pHs-M) and it would be Greenaway-ish, idyllic but with a certain core of sadness. Kind of like william morris himself. What struck me about Nowhere was that, while it was his idea of a socialist utopia and how we might get there, everyone in it seemed vaguely bored, there was a sense of lassitude to it, from the title on down. Like there was nowhere to go from there. Morris wrote his utopic vision in the 1880s, it was not long before his death, and the whole thing reminded me not so much as a future vision but as Morris' ideal retirement community.

[maxskapol.livejournal.com]

Well, not necessarily it could be both:

http://www.thecentralcity.co.uk/

But cynical alternatives are much more fun. Take Zlad for instance,

http://www.molvania.com/video_medium_2.html

the representative of the utopian Molvania.

http://www.molvania.com.au/molvania/

Unrelated but...

[(Anonymous)]

... if you check out the one-page interview with Hiromix in the new i-D magazine, a lot of what she's saying is in tune with the Japanese 'slow life' thing...

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

hey- I'm sure going to check out that BBC stuff- [I have been following the idea of _tv_ on demand keenly. So many people down on television like it was poisonous to be in a room with one].

anyway- off subject- wondered if you were aware of the MOMUS TROMBONE QUARTET? I found them on napster when looking for momus stuff. It's good stuff.

Names names names...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It has long been my most cherished dream to make a record with the Momus Trombone Quartet. I suppose it would sound a bit like David Byrne's Music From The Knee Plays (http://www.talking-heads.net/kneeplays.html).

[eduard-green.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately napster doesn't have that one : (

I shall have to enjoy grown backwards instead.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

An interesting dystopian/Orwellian book has just been released called Divided Kingdom, in which the populace is relocated according to their temperaments (Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric and Melancholic).

http://www.dividedkingdom.co.uk/

Unrelated: Saw two of my favorite bald gents in NY this evening: Chuck Close and Mr. Columbo. Jorge is brimming with new projects, as usual, and I hope to aid him in a couple of his upcoming photographic/book capers. His month-long idyll in France seems to have agreed with him.

Mr. Close was being helped down the steps of a co-op building in Tribeca. It was touching to see how strangers pitched in to help him down and back safely into his wheelchair.

W

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that somewhere round the house I have - on cassette - all of Donoghue's Arts Without Mystery recorded. I certainly have a copy of the book he produced to accompany the lectures. Let me know if you're interested & I'm sure it can arranged for them to be sent to you.

Cheers Momus

[(Anonymous)]

I really enjoyed listening to the discussion.

And listening to a cultured British (as in opera and theatre) accent as opposed to cultured (as in yoghurt) Aussie accent was a nice change of gears.

Dave

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thanks for the crazy-ass links. I'm going to have to commit a good chunk of time to exploring the centralcity web site (or get some more bandwidth).