By examining two of the most acclaimed and popular televisual productions recently released, Mr. Robot (USA Network, 2015 - present) and Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix, 2011 - present), I wish to...Show moreBy examining two of the most acclaimed and popular televisual productions recently released, Mr. Robot (USA Network, 2015 - present) and Black Mirror (Channel 4/Netflix, 2011 - present), I wish to show up to what extent they portray the expansion of capitalism into the political, cultural and social dimensions of our Western contemporary reality as a phenomenon weakening our utopian sense of the future. Drawing upon the field of social theory, I will argue that Mr. Robot, with its emphasis on the political and cultural domains, shows how mechanisms of control and manipulation responding to the logic of late capitalism and consumerism are influencing our ability to imagine a new and alternative system to the current one. In the case of Black Mirror, criticism towards late capitalism revolves around the use and abuse of new technologies, which implement the spiral of image addiction, the power of commodities, and cause a dramatic change in the way we perceive the boundaries between life and death. Throughout my analysis, I will refer to the utopian genre, and, specifically, its most recent variation of critical dystopia, with the aim of considering the tension and interaction between utopia and dystopia in the two TV series as a strategy, first, to raise awareness in the public about the most degrading aspects of our reality and, secondly, to reinvigorate a concept of utopia not as escapist thinking, but as a transformative impulse to change society and potentially overcome the cultural deadlock of capitalism.Show less
For Svetlana Alexievich, both conventional history writing and art have proven inadequate to capture, or approximate to capture, reality. She turns to the voices of the ordinary people, writing a...Show moreFor Svetlana Alexievich, both conventional history writing and art have proven inadequate to capture, or approximate to capture, reality. She turns to the voices of the ordinary people, writing a work founded on oral stories. In some sense, with Second-hand Time Alexievich also seems to take the storytelling tradition up again, albeit in a different, more reflective manner now, to agitate against the rise of coherent textual narratives representing reality with a sense of closure. Through the way Alexievich has written a portrait of the history of the Soviet Union and its fall, she has expressed the belief that the real events of history are not the ones conventional historiography deals with. Only the ‘subjective’ experiences of big history by its participants, their little histories, can capture some kind of true history. Not only has Alexievich with Second-hand Time appropriated claims on truths and literature back to the common people, but also their grasp on their history and its writing. Alexievich transcends McCord’s ‘ideology of form’ and in the form of Second-hand Time implicitly expresses a philosophy on history, literature, language, human truths and, above all, their interconnectedness. In doing so she empowers the people by taking away the boundaries of language in which they are supposedly confined, ascribing them agency to speak in a language in between, or even outside of existing discourses on which they supposedly rely to produce them. Through recording the spoken language of literature as such, Alexievich is writing back history, and with it autonomy. By the simultaneous elimination of the hierarchy of artists/non- artists she has democratized the production of literature, hence giving agency to the common people on multiple fronts. Lastly, Alexievich expresses a different idea of what literature is and makes clear that writing literature is more than the realization of literary imagination; it is the touching upon of human truths by any voice. When universal human truths uttered in a new language spontaneously appear in the conversational side of human life, fundamentally defined by its ‘momentariness’, a sparkle of literature occurs. In Alexievich’s conception of literature, eternity and the eternal here and now coincide.Show less
