Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds

Front Cover
Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, Thomas W. Rieger
Berghahn Books, 2005 M07 1 - 328 pages

After the breakdown of socialist and communist systems in the East, it had become fashionable to declare the so-called "end of utopia" ("end of history," "end of narratives"). The authors of this volume do not share this view but think that it is time to rehabilitate utopian thought. The political concept of Utopia that has given its name to these transcendental projections onto the world has been too narrow to describe and analyze the moving forces of the mind perceiving human existence beyond reality. By broadening the perspectives of utopian studies, these essays enable the reader to reconstruct scholarly paradigms and strategies of utopian, complex and holistic thinking in modern cosmology, philosophy, sociology, in literary, historical and political sciences, and to compare traditions and ways of Western utopian thought to the practice in the East.

 

Contents

Chapter 1 The Necessity of Utopian Thinking
1
PART I POLITICS CONSTRUCTION AND FUNCTIONS OF UTOPIAN THINKING
15
Chapter 2 Aspects of the Western Utopian Tradition
17
Chapter 3 Visions of the Future
32
Some Concomitants of the Dimensions of Sociality
51
Chapter 4 Utopia Contractualism Human Rights
53
Chapter 5 On the Construction of Worlds
67
PART II ARTIFICIAL WORLDS AND THE NEW MAN
87
Chapter 10 Haunted by Things
151
Chapter 11 Art Museum Utopia
169
Chapter 12 Art Science Utopia in the Early Modern Period
174
Chapter 13 Utopiary
190
PART IV UTOPIA AS A MEDIUM OF CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
205
Chapter 14 The Utopian Vision East and West
207
Chapter 15 Trauma
230
Chapter 16 From Revolutionary to Catastrophic Utopia
247

Chapter 6 Bodies in Utopia and Utopian Bodies in Imperial China
89
Perspectives of a ComputerAssisted Evolution of Humankind
104
Chapter 8 Thinking about the Unthinkable
120
Chapter 9 Natural Utopianism in Everyday Life Practice
136
PART III MUSEUM AS UTOPIAN LABORATORY
149
Chapter 17 The Narrative Staging of Image and CounterImage
263
Chapter 18 Rethinking Utopia
276
Notes on Contributors
283
Index
293
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About the author (2005)

Michael Fehr has been Director of the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum of the City of Hagen, Germany, since 1987. Prior to that he was Assistant Professor at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, and Deputy Director at the Art Museum of the City of Bochum. He has curated numerous exhibitions on contemporary art, cultural history and city planning, and, in the 1970s, created and organized for almost one decade the Kemnade International, a cultural festival for immigrant workers and their families in Germany. He has published extensively on contemporary art as well as on theory of museums. He teaches museology at University of Bonn.

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