Archive for May, 2008
Critical Foresight: The Present
The future is socially constructed; it is not an element of empirical reality. As with time in general, the future is constitutive of a social and cultural order. Our conception of time and modes of time keeping are also culturally specific. For Australian society does not regard time nor keep time in the same manner or form as say Indian or Chinese cultures. How Australians reckon the pattern of passing moments is culturally specific to a western scheme of calibration and temporality. Similarly, Australian responses and reactions to patterns of time reckoning are also culturally specific. In Australia, citizens are inculcated to react to socio-temporal cues like, say, Australia Day on January 26 or Anzac Day on April 25. Other cultures do not respond to these cues in the same way that Australians choose and are often required to. Responses to socio-temporal cues are learnt.
Critical Foresight: Introduction
Towards Critical Cultural Foresight addresses the manner in which knowledge of the future (or ‘futurestext’, that is, information positioned and empowered as being ‘relevant’ to the future and significant to the construction and formation of the ‘future’ subject) was created, propagated and given prominence in Australian culture and Australian Studies during the calendar move from the second to the third millennium. It argues that the future can be positioned as a text subject to various desires and uses and that from such positioning a form of apocalyptic thinking can be observed as a deep cultural process guiding interpretations of the future for Australians. Situated within the often overlooked discipline of Australian Studies, a field succinctly described by Ffion Murphy as ‘a discursive formation and cluster of theoretical and methodological strategies for scholarly inquiry into Australia’, [2] this thesis interrogates the politics behind processes actively inventing the future.
Just A Little Conflict Investment
I’m growing very tired of the superhero genre lately and its rather repetitive instances of urban gang warfare between chemical, genetic, extraterrestrial, supernatural or technologically-enhanced freaks. As Theodor Adorno might say, contemporary cinema is certainly providing the public with an “unconscious canon of what they do not want, that is, something different from what they are presently being fed”. How many times should we endure the same narrative structures and sequences, the same beats, the same super-augmented character battling it out with another super-powered character in a city or highway setting, throwing cars and people about like raging toddlers with their toys? It was innovative the first time in Superman 2 (1980) but after Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3, and now Ironman (and Edward Norton’s soon-to-be-released The Incredible Hulk), it seems probable that road rage is becoming the metaphor of our times and the lazy conflict device of contemporary cinema.
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