ES3209 - context notes for your first assignment

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Last updated 13.10.09.

As was discussed in the last seminar, there needs to be some subtlety in your approach to the 'social', but your work in the second year on Education: Social & Political Thought provides you with an extensive range of sources.  You were also introduced to Paul Scheerbart's rhapsodies on glass architecture.  There are various references to this topic which you can research using Google to complement the short hand-out by Gertrud Olsson.  You may recall that the reason this was mentioned was that it afforded you an example of a writer making extravagant claims for the transformative powers of architecture and the built environment.  Scheerbart was writing about glass's metaphorical and spiritual charge as much as its basic design potential, and you may find it helpful to compare these claims with other comments on the Great Exhibition's 'Crystal Palace', and the late Nineteenth Century enthusiasm for glass arcades - see, in particular, references to Walter Benjamin's unfinished 'Arcades Project.'

If you now reflect on the examples that have been featured so far in this module, you will recognise that all of them contain examples of specialist architectural features being associated with particular forms of social life - in these media texts styles of architecture become a kind of visual short-hand for particular forms of social life.  Both Forster and Tarde describe completely subterranean human cultures, while Wells in The Time Machine features the underground factories of the Morlocks - or in his The First Men on the Moon the underground cities of the Selenites.  You will also recall, no doubt, the extreme contrast between the underground dwellings of the workers and the above ground buildings of their managers in Metropolis.  But just what set of metaphorical charge is conveyed by underground living?  Here is an extract from The Time Machine, and here are some associated topics that may help you decide how to compare Foster and Tarde's texts with typical examples of the subterranean metaphorical charge: the grave, the gravestone, burial - of bodies - of rubbish, etc., cellars and underground prisons, dungeons, and oubliettes, burial of bodies inside houses, burial of bodies under boundary walls and boundary markers, crypts, mausoleums, caves, caverns, tunnels, pits, mines, etc. 

(A useful text to also find out about is Robert Pogue Harrison's The Dominion of the Dead:.)

Another recommended extension analysis, again employing Google initially, is to find out about small-scale and experimental societies.  The web resources given below may help, but in addition, there are a number of Science Fiction Examples that you may like to think about.  Generation ships, cross generation ships, embryo space colonisation, sleeper ships, and James Blish's use of spindizzies all provide examples of writers documenting micro-societies - here are some titles:. James Blish - Cities in Flight; Poul Anderson - Tau Zero; Edmund Cooper - Seed of Light; A. E. van Vogt - Rogue Ship; Stephen Baxter - Resplendent; Frederick Pohl - Jem, Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop, etc.  You may also find it interesting to read accounts of/speculations about the cultures of Easter Island, Tristan da Cunha,  and other communities isolated by geography, history, or culture..

Robert Owen - his A New View of Society

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/368owennewview.html

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/newview.html

http://www.punkerslut.com/critiques/owen/newview.html

Utopian Socialists - much over-lapping with the individual entries given above, but additional sources and useful overviews

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm

http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/samsoc/sovsoc/sovsoc1.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture21a.html

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture22a.html

http://www.the-wood.org/socialism/utopian.htm

http://www.english.ilstu.edu/strickland/495/utopia.html

http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/english/subcultures/colors/red/jtrieb01/utopiaront.html