“The Contemporary Significance of Utopia”: The Fifth International SJTU Forum on Critical Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 15-17 May 2015

The Fifth International Forum on Critical Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture is to takeplace on the SJTU Campus from Friday, 15 May, to Sunday, 17 May, 2015. Itrepresents a continuation of previous forums which focused on Marxistaesthetics and thus on a narrower theme than the 2015 forum.

As with the past forumsthe aim of the next one is to offer a meeting ground for critical intellectualsfrom across the humanities and social sciences and from across the world and topromote and intensify the development of aesthetics and philosophy in China andwider, both in their relation to art and culture as well as to traditions ofCritical Theory, post-structuralism and radical theoretical traditions such as Marxism.

Approximately 50scholars from abroad and from China are expected to attend the forum, presentpapers and partake in the discussions on a variety of themes related to theconcept of “utopia.” The organizers believe the topic is relevant and itsdiscussion timely and would therefore wish to contribute to past and recentdebates about utopia.

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An important part ofwestern social thought is related to the idea of an ideal society or communitythat is to be better, more just and happier than the extant ones. The idea ofutopia appears in Plato, is continued with Thomas More, and turns into dystopiain the twentieth century in literature (by writers such as Aldous Huxley orH.G. Wells) and in popular culture (as in movies such as Bladerunner or Terminator).These latter visions of another community and reality are figments ofindividual imagination. Others are communal: erected on religious grounds(supporting various religious communities in the U.S. in the eighteenth and thenineteenth centuries), on social ones (first ideas about communism that emergedin the end of the eighteenth century in the proletarian environment of FaubourgSt Antoine in Paris) or cultural (the notion of the golden age). With the endof master narratives the idea of utopia disappears too, to be reborn, even ifwith skepticism, in recent decades with the rise of neoliberalism and the strengtheningsense that cataclysmic real events—social, economic, climatic— requirealternative visions of the future, if there is to be a future. Art shares inthis development.

Utopia isessentially tied to history—its description or depiction of the past and itsvisions of the future. The “postutopian” interpretation of human historycarries overt consequences for organization of various communities and affectsthe reconfigurations of the sensible. The post-utopian viewpoint on historyaffects also an important segment of recent and contemporary art. We may saythat utopia—no longer as the spatial but as the temporal phenomenon — affects allspheres of human life and the main political theories of the last twocenturies. Utopia has metamorphosized into the philosophy of history (Kosseleck).

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Themes:

1. Utopia, Dystopia and Post-Utopia:     Visions of the Future and Re-evaluations of the Past

2. Utopias in Space and Utopias in Time

3. Aesthetic Revolutions and the     Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements

4. Biopolitical Utopias

5. Art in Utopian and Post-Utopian Times

6. Utopia and Urbanism

7. Tragedy, Utopia and Progress

8. Aesthetic Dimension of “China Dream”

PaperPreparation:

Only Word documentswill be accepted, the suggested front type and dimension are Times New Romanand 11, the number of page shall be between 5 and 15. In order to select thepaper that will be presented during the conference abstracts will be evaluatedby a group of experts. A selection of papers will be published after thegathering.Please send your abstract to csaact@sjtu.edu.cn before 30 November 2014, you will receive a confirmation ofreceipt, in case you don’t please re-send your e-mail.

Admission fee:

Students andPh.D.students 200 Yuan

Academics and all participants500 Yuan

The admission feecovers the attendance to the whole conference, related materials and food.

Dr. Qinghong Yin,

Journal of Research on Marxist Aesthetics,

School of Humanities,Shanghai Jiao Tong University

800 Dongchuan Road,Shanghai, China.200240