Abstract
In my presentation, I will approach utopias and dystopias - predominantly as artforms - through the philosophy of art and history of an American philosopher Arthur C. Danto.
The conference title, "Looking Forward in Hope and Despair, " implies that utopias and dystopias provide us with the vision of the future. But are we really looking forward? My thesis is that utopias and dystopias say about our current state of affairs, and therefore they reflect our present hopes and despairs or fears.
Moreover, this thesis can explain why more utopias and dystopias written by marginalized political and societal groups have become more numerous. Although Danto is known mostly as a philosopher of art, he paid systematic attention to the problems of the philosophy of history.
In his Analytical Philosophy of History and Narration and Knowledge, he introduced the notion of narrative, i.e., a story used to explain past events, and argued that the future forms an integral part of the past. Thus, historical understanding has a retrospective character in that the meaning of an event changes in the light of future happening.
Later in his career, Danto touch upon the problem of artistic representation of the future, especially in his essay The End of Art. In this essay, he claimed that our depiction of the world's future state says about our present but not about the future itself.
Danto did not explicitly consider utopias and dystopias; however, his thesis is general enough to cover these particular artforms. In my presentation, I will put these two streams of Danto's thought together.
At first, I will explain Danto's notion of narrative and his position concerning the future. Second, I will pay attention to his interpretation of art representing the future.
Following Danto's sketches in his texts on the end of art, I aim to demonstrate what our visions of the future reveal about our present, i.e., our society's current state. And why we are locked in our age.
In doing so, I will consider Wittgenstein's notion of forms of life adopted by Danto and Danto's idea that art functions as a mirror reflecting our society's conventions discussed in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. For the example of literary dystopia, I will refer to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.