Monthly Archives: June 2017

The utopias of justice are perhaps even more familiar. Asking, typically, for great personal sacrifice, these utopias call for the abolition of all social injustice. While the French Revolution had its fair share of such visions, they reached an apotheosis in 20th-century Marxist politics. Despite his own personal rejection of utopianism, Lenin, high on his pedestal addressing workers in October 1917, came to be the embodiment of all three forms of utopia. At the heart of the Soviet vision there were always those burning eyes gazing intently, and with total confidence, toward the promised land.

Today, the utopian impulse seems almost extinguished. The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behavior. The utopias of technology are less impressive than ever now that after Hiroshima and Chernobyl we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouges killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

The great irony of all forms of utopianism can hardly escape us. They say one thing, but when we attempt to realize them they seem to imply something entirely different. Their demand for perfection in all things human is often pitched at such a high level that they come across as aggressive and ultimately destructive. Their rejection of the past, and of established practice, is subject to its own logic of brutality.

And not only has the utopian imagination been stung by its own failures, it has also had to face up to the two fundamental dystopias of our time: those of ecological collapse and thermonuclear warfare. The utopian imagination thrives on challenges. Yet these are not challenges but chillingly realistic scenarios of utter destruction and the eventual elimination of the human species. Add to that the profoundly anti-utopian nature of the right-wing movements that have sprung up in the United States and Europe and the prospects for any kind of meaningful utopianism may seem bleak indeed. In matters social and political, we seem doomed if not to cynicism, then at least to a certain coolheadedness.

Anti-utopianism may, as in much recent liberalism, call for controlled, incremental change. The main task of government, Barack Obama ended up saying, is to avoid doing stupid stuff. However, anti-utopianism may also become atavistic and beckon us to return, regardless of any cost, to an idealized past. In such cases, the utopian narrative gets replaced by myth. And while the utopian narrative is universalistic and future-oriented, myth is particularistic and backward-looking. Myths purport to tell the story of us, our origin and of what it is that truly matters for us. Exclusion is part of their nature.

Can utopianism be rescued? Should it be? To many people the answer to both questions is a resounding no.

There are reasons, however, to think that a fully modern society cannot do without a utopian consciousness. To be modern is to be oriented toward the future. It is to be open to change even radical change, when called for. With its willingness to ride roughshod over all established certainties and ways of life, classical utopianism was too grandiose, too rationalist and ultimately too cold. We need the ability to look beyond the present. But we also need Mores insistence on playfulness. Once utopias are embodied in ideologies, they become dangerous and even deadly. So why not think of them as thought experiments? They point us in a certain direction. They may even provide some kind of purpose to our strivings as citizens and political beings.

We also need to be more careful about what it is that might preoccupy our utopian imagination. In my view, only one candidate is today left standing. That candidate is nature and the relation we have to it. Mores island was an earthly paradise of plenty. No amount of human intervention would ever exhaust its resources. We know better. As the climate is rapidly changing and the species extinction rate reaches unprecedented levels, we desperately need to conceive of alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.

Are our industrial, capitalist societies able to make the requisite changes? If not, where should we be headed? This is a utopian question as good as any. It is deep and universalistic. Yet it calls for neither a break with the past nor a headfirst dive into the future. The German thinker Ernst Bloch argued that all utopias ultimately express yearning for a reconciliation with that from which one has been estranged. They tell us how to get back home. A 21st-century utopia of nature would do that. It would remind us that we belong to nature, that we are dependent on it and that further alienation from it will be at our own peril.

Espen Hammer is a professor of philosophy at Temple University and the author of Adornos Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe.

Now in print: The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, an anthology of essays from The Timess philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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A Utopia for a Dystopian Age - New York Times

Posted June 27, 2017 06:42:23

The 1955 Australian film Jedda told the story of a young Aboriginal girl separated from her family and raised by a white woman, taught European ways and forbidden to learn her own culture.

Now, the woman who played Jedda hopes to reverse that by teaching young locals about their own culture first and foremost, with plans to develop a new school in the remote Utopia region of the Northern Territory.

Rosalie Kunoth-Monks starred as Jedda, and has signed a memorandum of understanding on behalf of the Alukura Foundation with Sydney's Barker College to establish the Jedda Academy for the Education of Young Girls on the Utopia Homelands.

The region, about 260 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, is one of the country's remotest.

In 2015, Ms Kunoth-Monks was NAIDOC's Person of the Year, as well as the NT's Australian of the Year, and is chairperson of the Alukura Foundation.

She said there was a need in Utopia to strengthen young people's learning by grounding them firmly in their own culture by local educators.

"We signed, we hope, the beginning of really growing two diverse cultures to come together in a way without destroying the other, or without being disengaged from the other," she said.

At the local school in the main Utopia homeland of Arlparra, 206 students are enrolled; Term one attendance was 53 per cent. The school also runs four other homeland learning centres in the region.

Nationally, the latest Closing the Gap report showed in very remote areas, Indigenous school attendance was 66.4 per cent, compared to 91.1 per cent of non-Indigenous students, something the new academy hopes to improve for its students.

Education of Indigenous children "has to get away from the assimilationist approach", Ms Kunoth-Monks said.

"We have a right to retain our identity. In that identity comes your stability, your belongingness and the capacity [for children] to comprehend in their earlier years."

Ms Kunoth-Monks said she felt the mainstream educational system had been pigeonholing Indigenous children and curtailing their abilities, resulting in their disengagement from classroom learning.

"There's many of my people in the Top End of Australia that are also querying that shoving down your throat of a foreign ideal and so forth, that is wrong," Ms Kunoth-Monks said.

"You've got to first of all get that child to accept itself and have confidence in that little body to say, 'This is who I am. Now I want to know further, I want to know what it is in that big wide world'."

Sydney's Barker College has already established an Aboriginal campus on the Central Coast of NSW, called Darkinjung Barker.

Principal Phillip Heath said funding for the Jedda Academy would not be drawn from Barker College tuition fees, but would be sourced privately to begin with, before approaching the Government.

About 30 children of varying ages will be educated at the Jedda Academy "with the intent that we celebrate traditional culture, traditional identity, traditional language, but we support the learning that goes on beyond that so they can contribute to the world that goes outside their community", Mr Heath said.

He said teaching children their own culture first would help boost academic outcomes.

"We've tried so hard for so long; generation after generation we've been discouraged by under-achievement of our First Nations children," he said.

"There's no reason why they shouldn't be doing well academically they're clever, they're committed."

In 2007, Mr Heath started the Gawura Indigenous School at St Andrew's Cathedral School in Sydney, which has a 95 per cent attendance rate, most of the school's NAPLAN results are above the national average, and some graduates are now attending university.

He said there needed to be a change in the cultural setting of schooling for Aboriginal students.

"Rather than school happening to you, it happens with you in a culturally informed and gentle way; particularly in this case, where we celebrate the role our young women play in building great culture and a strong community life," Mr Heath said.

"We know from all the evidence right across the world that our young girls, if well-educated, will bring fantastic results to the strength of the local community.

"We want to provide in that setting strong literacy, strong numeracy, high expectations, high attendance, all the things that we yearn to see in this country."

Ms Kunoth-Monks said only some young boys would be educated at the academy alongside girls, because according to local custom, girls and boys are educated separately as they grow into adulthood.

"We want to see the best for our girls here," she said.

"The girls play a large role in that nurturing part, in holding the country, in having that country pattern [painted] on your body and singing it and dancing it and making sure that goes on to the next millennium."

If the school is a success, a second school for local boys will be established, she said.

Mr Heath said establishing the academy was about taking a serious step towards closing the gap.

"If we're serious about reconciliation, we need to go further than just voicing it. We should go further than just acknowledging country or celebrating NAIDOC Week or Reconciliation Week," he said.

"From our point of view, we get access to one of the richest, deepest, oldest, most spiritual and most profound cultures on the planet.

"Who wouldn't want to educate their children in cities with access to that experience?"

If fundraising to establish the school is successful, it could be operational as soon as first term 2018, Mr Heath said.

Topics: education, access-to-education, schools, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, youth, indigenous-culture, alice-springs-0870, sydney-2000, darwin-0800

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Barker College agrees to launch Aboriginal academy for girls in Utopia homelands - ABC Online

Written by Shalini Nair | Updated: June 26, 2017 12:07 am It is alright to overlay the citys infrastructure with technology but, for starters, adequate infrastructure must be in place at a city-wide level. (Representational. Express photo)

In a phantasmagorical rendering of the future of urban space thats increasingly being made sentient through information technology, the Architectural League of New York held an exhibition in 2009 on the Too Smart City. Through smart public benches that respond to the issue of homelessness by toppling those resting on them for too long and smart bins that can squirt out the wrong kind of trash back at the person, architects and artists showed how the Smart City is just a step away from a dystopian nightmare.

While this might be one of the worst-case scenarios, with the Indian Smart City missions tantalising promise to transform 100 cities, perhaps, now is a good time to consider two issues: Whether the path it has chosen to leapfrog to the level of urbanisation in the developed nations entails creation of uneven geographies. And whether Indian cities, lacking in the most basic infrastructure, are ready to be restructured by technology.

In his book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, urbanist Anthony Townsend defines Smart Cities as places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and our own bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems. A growing cause of worry among Smart City critics in the West has been how big data is a veritable goldmine for data thieves and a surveillance tool for governments and private firms involved. For urban planners, a greater concern is an urbanisation process that accords primacy to technology a field where the private sector has unchallenged monopoly over the basic needs of the city.

The most defining feature of the Smart City mission in India is this: It not only looks at application of technology but also ensures that physical infrastructure of cities, which owing to considerations of social equity, were until now serviced almost entirely by local governments, are redesigned to create space for domestic and international capital. Already the model has thrown up numbers that show that almost 80 per cent of the funds are being channelised to less than three per cent area of the 59 mission cities. These are mostly well-off enclaves that already have decent infrastructure in place and are more likely to yield a dividend for private investors.

Several Smart Cities of the West have been officially conceptualised as living labs, that is, incubators for developing patentable and exportable devices for private firms. The UK Trade & Investment pegs the market for Smart City products and services at more than 900 billion by 2020. India is, no doubt, poised to be one of the largest market for the products developed by technology vendors in these living labs.

The issue is not only the parachuting of consulting firms and vendors for local IT and infrastructure solutions, but that such private partnerships would necessitate a return on investments unconstrained by concerns of social equity or justice. The abolition of octroi, the once largest source of municipal revenue for many cities, has had a debilitating impact on the fiscal sovereignty of urban local bodies. The Smart City mission further bypasses democratic processes by executing projects through Special Purpose Vehicles wherein private corporations can have up to 40 per cent share-holding.

As a corollary, the Union government has made it clear that increased user charges on essential services is the only way forward. Unlike octroi, this hits every citizen irrespective of their income level.

The catchphrase Smart Cities latched on to the Indian imaginary when barely a fortnight after assuming office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spelled out his ambitious plan of creating 100 such cities where the focus shifts from highways to i-ways. It is alright to overlay the citys infrastructure with technology but, for starters, adequate infrastructure must be in place at a city-wide level. Smart Cities might be an inexorable, and even necessary, step in the process of urbanisation but gentrification doesnt have to be the default route.

Official data shows that merely half of the urban households have water connections, a third have no toilets, the national average for sewage network coverage is a low 12 per cent, and on an average only about 10 per cent of the municipal solid waste is segregated. Public transportation and public schools and hospitals are woefully disproportionate to the population densities within cities.

Unless this urban entropy is addressed first, an overbearing emphasis on application of digital technology or developing smaller areas in an attempt at instant urbanism can have disastrous socio-spatial consequences.

shalini.nair@expressindia.com

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The Too Smart City - The Indian Express