Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event date:1 March 2011 10.30 – 17.00
British Library
London Room MR4

The Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at
Royal Holloway University of London presents:

Civilizational Collapse: Dystopian Imaginings of the Past,
Present, and Future (1880 – Present)

The fear of Civilization collapse is a thread that runs through much of the literature, cinema, and other media of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Whereas the Utopian moment is paradigmatically in the future, the Dystopic moment is paradigmatically in the past. Dark ages, political catastrophes, and apocalyptic ends haunt the modern. For the Western tradition, a key narrative is the ‘Fall of the Roman Empire’, but this is far from being the only catastrophic trope within modern and late-modern cultures. Twentieth-century ends of the world have ranged from alien invasion and self-destruction through to the misuse of technology or spectacular technological failure, extenuated class conflict, or an apathetic decline into barbarity or moral degeneration, alongside religious conflagration, environmental and climatic change. The sheer inventiveness of the manifold ways in which the world may be brought to an end encourages us to understand the apocalyptic urge as a central element within contemporary societies.

This workshop aims to investigate how and why the apocalyptic urge manifests itself in modern societies. We propose a multi-disciplinary approach to challenge methodological conventions and allow a triangulation of the emerging narrative within diering critical traditions. To this end, we invite contributions from across the arts, humanities and social sciences that address those.

Why Civilizational Collapse?
Anyone who studies Roman history works in the shadow of civilizational collapse, be it the end of the Republic or the end of the Roman empire. The field of study centres on an absence, an ending of a world. But the ruins and ruination of Rome are not ‘distant’ from contemporary culture; they are continuously invoked and re-imagined. Further, although the ‘end’ dominates the historiography, there is little evidence that the prevalent decline (which in some accounts lasts seven centuries)  was felt in such ‘final’ terms by contemporaries. The cultural import of ‘the End’ needs explanation. I suggest three characteristics.
a.    Collapse is culturally pervasive: Jameson argues that the utopian urge can be seen in virtually all literary production, a view of what society could be and has not achieved. Conversely, one could argue that the dystopic is similarly present, a vision of the ‘bad’ that society could become.
b.    Collapse is temporal: The moment of civilizational collapse is a moment which is beyond time, when time must have a stop (Walter Benjamin) and thus outside the normal historical sequences. After the revolution, time may recommence, but the gap is pervasive because it is not within a temporal structure.
c.    Collapse is spatial: often located in the city, often seen from above, civilizational collapse is a feature of the mass society.
d.    Collapse is psychological: there is exhilaration in catastrophe, when disciplinary structures come to an end, and there is also opportunity. Particular forms of masculinity take to the road and heroism (once more) becomes possible.
This leads to three issues which we might address
i.    Is dystopia utopia’s evil twin?
ii.    What is the chronological relationship of dystopia (present, past, and future)?
iii.    Are dystopic visions inherently conservative?

EVENT SUPPORTED BY:
Royal Holloway Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC),
Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome (CRGR),
Institute of Classical Studies (SAS),
British Library.

Event date:1 March 2011 10.30 – 17.00
British Library
London Room MR4

The Humanities and Arts Research Centre (HARC) at
Royal Holloway University of London presents:

Civilizational Collapse: Dystopian Imaginings of the Past,
Present, and Future (1880 – Present)

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Phiroze Vasunia: Ends of Empires (not recorded)

Empires hate nothing so much as contemplating their own ends, but such ends of empire bring their own temporality. There is a sense of inevitability about ends of empire which requires the observer to await the barbarian (as in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian) but the repressive measures to keep out the barbarian are such the individuals might be tempted to cross over and let the barbarian in. The trope of decline and fall established by Gibbon influenced American imperial discourses. Although there were hopes that the Republic might survive the entropy of empires, and the pecularity of America’s domestic empire encouraged a separation from the fate awaiting Rome, American decline and the restoration of the American landscape was often seen as inescapable. For the British, it was the Orient that threatened, with images of death and squalor. In Kipling, the great nightmare of the imperialist was that he might fall among the Indians, with no escape, no status by which he could be differentiated, and no historical escape. Fear of the infection of empire, becomes a fear of death and of mortality, a psychological as well as a political malaise.

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(AUDIO UNAVAILABLE)

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