Art: Futures of the past

This essay makes a demand: it calls for a divorce between art and culture in order to reaffirm a future for art. It asks whether in a scenario in which political culture has surrendered to cultural politics, can art reaffirm and reconfigure itself as a site of exuberance, wonder, vitality, affect, memory and learning, and create a place of ethical and critical resistance?     

The Museums' future

‘The Museums' Future’ argues that through the effects of the postmodernisation of museums, art has been ceded variously to culture, commerce, politics, values and to experience. In this scenario, political culture has surrendered to cultural politics.It asks whether a museum project of the future can be envisaged in which history and experience are not replaced entirely by spectacle, and memory is not banalized? Can the museum contribute to reconfigurations of the Subject and Other and to identity and difference without falling into the traps of a politics of identity? Can the museum find ways of reaffirming universal principles without running the risk of imposing a new order dominated by a single culture?     

Perpetual war(s) and the future of democracy

Democracy is fighting more than one perpetual war, it is fighting numerous wars. Although the actual term ‘perpetual war’ belongs firmly in the context of the militarized state in readiness to fight the battle, my concern in this paper is about extending this term to elucidate the crimes against democracy from within liberal democratic states. The connective web of the ‘war on terrorism’ and these internal wars is expressively clear. The international stage of conflict is compellingly driven by a neoliberal polity fierce in its demands of the social settings required for further wealth expansion and this involves a war on refugees, a war on the deserving poor, a war on the welfare state—essentially a war in perpetuity on dissent, difference and radical alternative thinking. Democracy has become an anachronism: what are the values that underpin it, what are the enduring ethics and moral behavior guiding it? From ostracized dissenter to compassionate citizen, this paper looks at how the very complexity and fluidity of liberal democracy may be its only salvation.     

Futures of art in retrospect

This article questions certain current assumptions taken as decisive for the future of art. One such notion is that the future of art can be predicated on media technologies. But art history is not a straightforward progression from one state of media practice to another. Art does not respond to the paradigm shifts which are normal to the advance of science. The impasse struck by early 20th century avantgarde modernist innovation would seem to underpin a necessary cultural transition to the time-based and networked collaborative practices of electronic technology in the aesthetic sector. This paper challenges that assumption and puts in question the very nature of art history itself. Artistic originality is not simply unpredictable but a conundrum of negative dormancy resistant to futurist study as explored in these pages. Art does not submit to forecasting, programming or normalization. In this sense, art has no future.     

Symbolizing the future—towards a futures'' iconography

This essay brings the art historical methodology of iconography to bear upon symbolic representations of futures issues. The discipline of iconography was developed as a way of analysing symbolism as it evolved from antiquity to the Baroque in order to identify and interpret the meaning of symbols within their wider cultural context. Symbols constitute significant indicators of the aspirations, belief systems and neuroses of the cultures which generate them. As such, they constitute fundamental tools in any analysis of past and contemporary attitudes towards science, technology and the future. With this in mind the essay considers symbolic images of the three fundamental aspects of futures studies—the interconnectedness of past, present and future, the plurality of options for the future, and the importance of the human input into technology and the creation of the future.     

Wealth from creativity: Insights and strategies for the future of international cultural relations

Regardless of frontier, the creative community has begun to benefit financially from the democratisation of creative production and distribution opened up via the Internet, a place where planetary plurality and diversity is implicit. Artists are major ambassadors for their cultures operating in a collaborative environment that recognises the distinctive differences between cultures without threat to indigenous expression.

The cultural ecology may have changed but the response of government has been obstructive. Until the second Iraq war cultural diplomacy seemed to have replaced gunboat diplomacy and there was a growing movement to foster cultural relations in an environment being characterised as mutual. In parallel, at national level, governments were seeking to recognise the strong economic value of the cultural industries sector in the new globalised technology. This has now all been thrown into reverse gear by the practice of public diplomacy, a policy of unreformed imperialist hubris that seeks to influence policy in other nations by using domestic producers of intellectual, scientific, creative or economic content to promote selected values and so dominate the international relations agenda.

What if one were to integrate into the activities of international cultural relations the dynamic ways of working and thinking of the creative industries? A more beneficial model emerges if creators are given centre-stage and the values of the creative community applied to the management of international cultural relations. A series of insights borne of many years work in the creative industries could lead to a new set of strategies that would call the bluff of those currently seeking to promote the advantages of liberal democracy. For these strategies demonstrably uphold the rights of individuals to creative expression and to enrich their local economies. This does require the managers of international cultural relations to live more dangerously than at present and it is to them that this paper is addressed.     

Religious regimes and prospects for liberal politics: Futures of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia

This paper interrogates Huntington's civilizational perspective in order to assess its power to explain cultural change in a non-Western context. As an alternative, it considers cultural change as issues resolutions. The paper then suggests that the nature of the national regime is one of the most important factors that shapes resolutions of issues—hence the state as one of the best predictors of the future of cultures in Islamic countries. From the values surveys carried out in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, this article extrapolates trends in values change among the publics from these countries. Key features of these trends include shifts toward liberal democracy and individualism among Iranians, toward secular politics and nationalism among Iraqis, and away from religiosity and toward support for gender equality among Saudis.     

Brand India—Where Next? A Panel Discussion

Three large‐company top executives, a prominent journalist, and a representative of India's Ministry of Tourism discuss the country's recent transformation into “the world's fastest‐growing, free‐market democracy.” Much of the discussion concerns the recent accomplishments of Indian companies and executives, both those working inside the country and the many who have risen to prominence outside it. But the recent rise of India is more than a matter of economic success. Brand India is also, in the words of one panelist, “a soft brand as well as a hard brand… It is not only about efficiency, but about democracy and reverence for learning and the past, about art and architecture, and Bollywood and yoga, all of which have a cultural and even a spiritual dimension.” As for India's material progress, journalist Vir Sanghvi traces the origins of India's recent economic growth back to 1991, the year the country launched its ambitious program of economic liberalization. In this view, the Indian success story is one that begins with the opening up of markets, a gradual (though uneven) privatization of industry, and increased foreign investment. These are the main contributors to India's recent burst of economic growth, which in turn has generated the tax revenues necessary to fund large‐scale spending on education and healthcare. But whether the rate of economic growth and social progress accomplished by this combination of private‐sector growth and public spending can be maintained will depend heavily on a political process that has often been hostile to the ideas of free markets, privatization, and foreign investment.     

Globalization the next round: Sociological perspectives

The twenty-first century momentum of globalization is markedly different from the twentieth century globalization (a new geography of trade, weaker hegemony, and growing multipolarity) and presents major questions. Is the rise of East Asia, China and India just another episode in the rise and decline of nations, another reshuffling of capitalism, a relocation of accumulation centers without affecting the logics of accumulation? Does it advance, sustain or halt neoliberalism? The rise of Asia is codependent with neoliberal globalization and yet unfolds outside the neoliberal mold. What is the relationship between zones of accumulation and modes of regulation? What are the ramifications for the global inequality? What does sociology contribute to this question?     

The end of neoliberal history—the future of economics

The future of economics needs discussion both negatively, as the denial of neoliberal perspective, and positively as a science that is able to handle the historic welfare-freedom-culture paradox. The authors state that this alternative is political economy, which they define as a science searching for materialisation of social visions in the economic sphere. This tradition dates back to ancient cultures and does not coincide with the present usage of political economy. The article discusses the political economy of the information age and beyond. The core idea is that the human alternative of ongoing technological changes executes long run visions of mankind: co-existence of freedom and welfare under cultural leadership in a global scale.     

The long-term future of the great barrier reef

Long-term participative regional planning is a relatively new and developing field in Australia. To conduct a futures project that seeks to address the serious matters of reef-related food production, jobs, recreation, cultural heritage and the conservation of the Great Barrier Reef with over 60 organizations participating, is not without its challenges. This futures project—the 25-year Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area Strategic Plan Development Project—has been described by the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) as having established a world model in participative regional planning for ecologically sustainable use of a natural resource. This article deals with the following questions: Why was the futures project needed? What was done? How was it achieved? What else needs to occur now and in the future? And, so what?     

Tocqueville revisited. The meaning of American prosperity

Why is business so admired in the United States and so often denigrated in Europe? How has America created 30 million new jobs in the last 20 years while the European Union, with a bigger population, only managed 5 million? What is feeding America's apparently inexhaustible appetite for growth and its recent dramatic improvements in productivity? In 1831, French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to examine its prison system and returned with a vision of democracy so profound it has become part of our cultural heritage. More than a century and a half later, renowned British business philosopher Charles Handy retraces Tocqueville's intellectual journey, this time focusing not on democracy but on capitalism. The result is an eye-opening look at some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning business in America today. It is America's optimism that Handy finds most striking, the unquestioned belief that tomorrow can--and should--be made better than today. He contrasts this with the Spaniards when they came to the New World: No haya novedades, those Spaniards would say, "Let nothing new arise." The energy engendered by American optimism, coupled with the Puritan belief in work and in the nobility of earned wealth (as opposed to Europe's furtive attitude toward its nobility's inherited wealth) lies, in Handy's view, at the heart of America's success. Will American capitalism, born as it was from a property-owning democracy, now adapt to a dematerialized world, where property is intellectual rather than physical? Handy draws no absolute conclusions, but rather lays out the challenges that must be overcome for tomorrow to indeed continue to be better than today in this still-young country.     

Carpe the academy: Dismantling higher education and prefiguring critical utopias through action research

This paper engages with the challenge of re-imagining higher education. We start from the position that the ascent of the increasingly corporatized university is deeply problematic precisely because of the neoliberal realist position on ‘the future’ that it assumes and perpetuates: the view that there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalist market principles, that present and future realities can diverge only to the extent permitted by existing market forces and rationales (Amsler, 2011). In this context, ‘education’ takes the form of preparing and socializing the next generation of workers: a future focus severely limited in the possibilities it considers. Thus we are faced with a mutually-constitutive relationship where constrained visions of future needs and demands serve to constrain present educational offerings; a dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing and which admits little disruption. In this paper, we draw on the concrete body of practice known as action research to consider how we might prize open spaces for thinking much more expansively about what ‘the future’ might entail, and what forms of education and organization are necessary in the present to keep open, rather than shut down, diverse possibilities and democratic debate around this. We focus on critical utopian action research and systemic action research as illustrative of key qualities of prefigurative and critical utopian engagement with educational presents and futures. We conclude that the capture of the university by neoliberal logics can be resisted and challenged through radical methodologies, like action research, which explicitly set out to be ongoingly anti-hegemonic, critical, self-reflexive, pluralistic, and non-recuperative (Firth, 2013, Garforth, 2009).     

新时期高校文科学报工作者的文化使命

在国家文化体制改革背景下,高校文科学报也将是改革建设的重点,学报编辑队伍的使命是继续坚持创造和发掘、记录和传播优秀的科学文化研究成果,将其转化并融入于科学文化传播的河流中,参与科学文化交流与创新。学报编辑人员承担着着文化科学研究与创新、学术与科研文化传播、为社会文化科学研究工作者服务的文化使命,提升自身的专业化和学术化水平,创办有价值的高校文科学报。     

How to rebuild democracy,re-thinking degrowth

Can the degrowth project contribute to rediscovering the meaning of democracy? Can the establishment of a real democracy lead to building a degrowth society? And last, has the project of a “democratic degrowth” a real chance to succeed, from a political point of view? If not, how should degrowth be re-thought to foster democracy? These are the questions entertained in this opinion essay. My thesis is that the currently dominant formulation of degrowth and its relationship to democracy are highly problematic. The degrowth proposal reproduces a central paradox of modernity concerning democracy: degrowth does not aspire to restore collective “legein”; it only works like a “teukein”, offering techniques that will allow the human species merely to “stay alive”. Moreover, there is a political problem: while the need for degrowth is presented as very urgent, the tactic for spreading the idea is one of an elitist strategy of voluntary simplicity, which can only work very slowly. The moralistic ideal of voluntary simplicity runs counter to the dominant de-modernized human subject that is becoming prevalent in our societies; as a result, degrowth cannot connect to real social processes and to the emotions of the large part of the population. To make degrowth feasible and to restore democracy, we need to deflate modern subjectivity. Drawing inspiration from Mediterranean anthropologies, I propose a foundation of degrowth on a human subject of “de-thinking” and I discuss the political pathways for such an alternative degrowth project.     

Unmasking scenario planning: The colonization of the future in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program

In the Netherlands, the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program has been introduced by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations in 2014, in the context of the ongoing transformation of the Dutch welfare state; more specifically, the transformation of the social care sector. Scenario planning is a major preoccupation in this program and two major reports have been published in this connection. In this article, the authenticity of the scenario planning of the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program is questioned. It is found that the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program’s scenario planning is not a real scenario planning but, instead, a continuation of the neoliberal discourse by hegemonic stakeholders that seek to ‘close’ the future. It is concluded in this article that in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program the future is colonized and presented as an impersonal trend in which governmental agency for creatively negating and transcending the neoliberal discourse is irrelevant.     

Contesting public accountability: A dialogical exploration of accountability and social housing

This paper analyses the interaction between neoliberal inspired reforms of public services and the mechanisms for achieving public accountability. Where once accountability was exercised through the ballot box, now in the neoliberal age managerial and market based forms of accountability predominate. The analysis identifies resistance from civil society campaigns to the neoliberal restructuring of public services which leads to public accountability (PA) becoming a contested arena. To develop this analysis a re-theorisation of PA, as a relationship where civil society seeks to control the state, is explored in the context of social housing in England over the past thirty years. Central to this analysis is a dialogical analysis of key documents from a social housing regulator and civil society campaign. The analysis shows that the current PA practices are an outcome of both reforms from the government and resistance from civil society (in the shape of tenants’ campaigns). The outcome of which is to tell the story of the changes in PA (and accountability) centring on an analysis of discourse. Thus, the paper moves towards answering the question – what has happened to PA during the neoliberal age?     

当前的金融和经济危机：一个新自由资本主义的系统性危机

本文给出了这样一种情况,即2008年从美国开始的金融和经济危机意味着新自由资本主义系统性危机的肇始。在过去几十年里推动了一系列长期经济扩张的一些新自由资本主义的制度特征,也同样产生了一种长期的趋势,这种趋势已经导致了系统性的危机。本文还考虑了经济重构的几种可能的未来方向。     

Democracy in the ageing society: Quest for political equilibrium between generations

The ageing of society looms large as having a huge impact on the future political landscape, and is increasingly being acknowledged as a serious threat to the sustainability of democracy. The ageing of the voting electorate is contributing to the political imbalance between the old and young generations, and has the potential to levy excessive burden on future generations. With this background in mind, this research seeks to point out, through reform of the electoral system, the problems of silver democracy caused by societal ageing, and to suggest ways to achieve political equilibrium between generations. Key suggestions are: 1) changing the basis of electoral districts from geographic area to age-cohort; 2) establishment of a new future generations district which can speak for the rights of those who are currently underage; and 3) weighting of votes cast by the younger generations, who may be at a numerical disadvantage in elections.