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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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Henry Jenkins on The Meaning of Steampunk
« on: 2007-06-19 02:08:17 » |
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[Blunderov] Brass Goggles meets Paleo Future
Table of Malcontents
Henry Jenkins on The Meaning of Steampunk
By John Brownlee June 18, 2007 | 10:51:56 AM
Cory Doctorow over Boing Boing points out this riveting read by Henry Jenkins, pop culture philosopher and maverick new media thinker, linking the meaning of steampunk to the allure of retro-futurism and even the surge in the eBay collectible market.
We might take two big ideas from Jameson's account of retrofuturism- that past imaginings of the future need to be understood as historical artifacts of older ideologies about human progress and that their remobilization in the present can be used as a means of reflecting on the failures of those dreams to become realities. While Jameson's work on postmodernism suggests that the redeployment of these older images of the future might amount to little more than an empty nostalgia, he seems to be hinting here that these images might function as vehicles of historical consciousness and thus as the basis for critique. Jameson's contemporaries were quick to explore the idea that "yesterday's tomorrows" might provide important clues into earlier moments in the history of the 20th century, a project reflected not only by the contributors to Corn's collection but also by essays like Andrew Ross's "Breaking Out of the Gernsback Continuum." But far less time has been spent exploring the contemporary deployment of earlier science fiction iconography as a way of working through the gap between an anticipated future and the lived reality of the late 20th century.
it's a huge, heady read (the first of a four part transcription of a talk Jenkins gave at the Berlin Comic Conference) but one that will certainly get the gaskets of the steampunk enthusiast trembling.
The tomorrow that never was [Henry Jenkins]
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