“The Power of Utopia”: The Political Turn of Contemporary Aesthetics
——The Fifth International Marxists Aesthetics Forum
Zhe Jiang University, 23-25 September 2016
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The Fifth International Marxists Aesthetics Forum is to take place on Zhe Jiang University at Hangzhou City closed to Shanghai, from Friday, 23h September, to Sunday, 25th, 2016. It represents a continuation of previous forums which focused on Marxist aesthetics and thus on a narrower theme than the 2016 forum.
As with the past forums the aim of the next one is to offer a meeting ground for critical intellectuals from across the humanities and social sciences and from across the world and to promote and intensify the development of aesthetics and critical theory in China and wider, both in their relation to art and culture as well as to traditions of Critical Theory, post-structuralism and radical theoretical traditions such as Marxism.
Approximately 50 scholars from abroad and from China are expected to attend the forum, presentation papers and partake in the discussions on a variety of themes related to the concept of “utopia.” The organizers believe the topic is relevant and its discussion timely and would therefore wish to contribute to past and recent debates about utopia.
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An important part of western social thought is related to the idea of an ideal society or community that is to be better, more just and happier than the extant ones. The idea of utopia appears in Plato, is continued with Thomas More, and turns into dystopia in the twentieth century in literature (by writers such as Aldous Huxley or H.G. Wells) and in popular culture (as in movies such as Bladerunner or Terminator). These latter visions of another community and reality are figments of individual imagination. Others are communal: erected on religious grounds (supporting various religious communities in the U.S. in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries), on social ones (first ideas about communism that emerged in the end of the eighteenth century in the proletarian environment of Faubourg St Antoine in Paris) or cultural (the notion of the golden age). With the end of master narratives the idea of utopia disappears too, to be reborn, even if with skepticism, in recent decades with the rise of neoliberalism and the strengthening sense that cataclysmic real events—social, economic, climatic—require alternative visions of the future, if there is to be a future. Art shares in this development.
Utopia is essentially tied to history—its description or depiction of the past and its visions of the future. The “post-utopian” interpretation of human history carries overt consequences for organization of various communities and affects the reconfigurations of the sensible. The post-utopian viewpoint on history affects also an important segment of recent and contemporary art. We may say that utopia—no longer as the spatial but as the temporal phenomenon—affects all spheres of human life and the main political theories of the last two centuries. Utopia has metamorphosized into the philosophy of history (Kosseleck).
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Themes:
- Utopia, Dystopia and Post-Utopia: Visions of the Future and Re-evaluations of the Past
- Utopia and Contemporary Aesthetics
- Aesthetic Utopias: Politics in Aesthetics and Aesthetics in Politics
- Art in Utopian and Post-Utopian Times
- Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction
- Utopia in Chinese New Cultural Movement
Paper Preparation:
Please send your paper abstract to wjie5710@126.com, before 30 June, 2016, you will receive an official invitation letter.
Chairman of the Forum
Professor Wang Jie in Literary Theory
Qiushi Distinguished Professor in Zhejiang University
The chief editor of the journal of Research on Marxist Aesthetics
Tel:+86-571-88273729(o) +86-571-87215892(H)
Contact Us
Dr. Yin Qinghong
The Journal of Research on Marxist Aesthetics,
Email: qinghong2010@sjtu.edu.cn
Tel: +86-21-34204548
