riceandweed on Nostr: “In short, the utopic cradles in the force field composed of several vectors: its ...
“In short, the utopic cradles in the force field composed of several vectors: its “strange attractors” are triangulated through three processes or systems: (1) the forces and energies of bodies, bodies that require certain material, social, and cultural arrangements to function in specific or required ways, and which in turn, through their structuring and habitual modes, engender and sustain certain modes of political regulation; (2) the pull or impetus of time, which grants a precedence of the future over the past and the present, and which threatens to compromise or undo whatever fixity and guarantees of progress, whatever planning and organization we seek in the present; and (3) the regulation and organization, whether literary or phantasmatic or pragmatic, of urban and rural spaces of inhabitation.
This triangulation has been rendered less compli- cated by the common move of dropping out or eliding one of these three terms—usually that represented by time and becoming. It is significant that the question of the future in and of the Republic, the future of the Utopians, remains unaddressed; utopia, like the dialectic itself, is commonly fantasized as the end of time, the end of history, the moment of resolution of past problems. The utopic organiza- tion is conceived as a machine capable of solving foreseeable problems through the perfection of its present techniques. This is the image of an ideal society in which time stops and, as Plato recognized, the timeless sets it. If we explore the plethora of other utopic visions, from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, to the general project of the social contract theorists in the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, Rousseau’s The New Héloïse and The Social Contract, through to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, we see that the ideal society, society in its perfection, is represented as the cessation of becoming, the overcoming of problems, a calm and ongoing resolution.” - Architecture from the Outside, Elizabeth Grosz
This triangulation has been rendered less compli- cated by the common move of dropping out or eliding one of these three terms—usually that represented by time and becoming. It is significant that the question of the future in and of the Republic, the future of the Utopians, remains unaddressed; utopia, like the dialectic itself, is commonly fantasized as the end of time, the end of history, the moment of resolution of past problems. The utopic organiza- tion is conceived as a machine capable of solving foreseeable problems through the perfection of its present techniques. This is the image of an ideal society in which time stops and, as Plato recognized, the timeless sets it. If we explore the plethora of other utopic visions, from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, to the general project of the social contract theorists in the eighteenth century, to Voltaire, Rousseau’s The New Héloïse and The Social Contract, through to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, we see that the ideal society, society in its perfection, is represented as the cessation of becoming, the overcoming of problems, a calm and ongoing resolution.” - Architecture from the Outside, Elizabeth Grosz