Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Too Like the Lightning
1
Ada Palmer
- cultural and intellectual historian focusing on the long-durée evolution of ideas
- specializes in early modern Europe, particularly the Italian Renaissance and Humanist reception of classical philosophy
Scholarly Intro
ENGL 520
Too Like the Lighting
24 April 2018
The Hive System
"It is not the representation of Utopia, but the conflict of all possible utopias..." - Jameson
Palmer's text is set in the year 2454. Goverments are no longer housed by nations, but by "Hives"
Hives are chosen based on which system of government you most agree with
2454
There are seven main hives discussed in the text; those who don't identify with any of them can elect to be "hiveless"
Humanists
Cousins
Masons
Gordian
Europeans
Mitsubishi
Utopia
Hiveless
The role of liberal education
Prioritizing
AGENCY/CHOICE
"Bash’-formation is expected to happen in the transition from youth to adulthood, when young people are at a Campus. A Campus isn’t quite a university, it’s an area with common spaces, dorms, and several different schools, some of which might be universities or colleges, others technical training spaces that teach you carpentry, programming, medicine, plumbing, etc. …There young people mix and mingle and meet each other and live together in dorms and form friend groups, and eventually come together into bash’es."
Choose your
utopia
Ways of Self-identifying
Identity
"I could ask any contemporary here, ‘Are you a majority?’ and I know what he or she would answer: Of course not, Mycroft. I have a Hive, a race, a second language, a vocation and an avocation, hobbies of my own; add up my many strats and you will soon reduce me to a minority of one, and hence my happiness. I am unique, and proud of my uniqueness, and prouder still that, by being no majority, I ensure eternal peace. (293-4)
"Africa and Europe are cofactors in her ancestry, visible in her rich, medium-brown skin and afro-textured hair, which she wears in a thousand little twists like tongues of flame, but Japan dominates her syntax, her posture, her reflexive half-bow as we arrive, and she wears a Japanese nation-strat bracelet." (TLL 76)
MINORITY RULE?
“If everyone is a minority, goes the reigning political doctrine, no one is oppressed, and nobody is the oppressor. In effect, Palmer’s twenty-fifth century is governed by subcultures.”
Minority
rule?
Polylaws
Blacklaw
Servicer Program
ROMANOVA
"If you were a Humanist and smoked cannabis in a town in an area that banned it, like Lagos, Cambodia, or Myanmar (regions with a Cousin majority), then you’d be guilty of breaking local laws and could be charged by the city. Your Hive would pay a fine to the city and then impose on you whatever punishment the Hive considered appropriate, which is often an equally sized fine, but sometimes something different."
THOUGHTS
“true multiculturalism would be the utopia of a neutral universal legal frame enabling each particular culture to assert its identity”
-Žižek
Final thoughts
“Early in the process…it was comparatively easy to found a Hive and people expected there to be lots and lots, [but by 2454,] it’s very hard; megahives have formed from mergers, [so] no one takes a new tiny one seriously”
Can a collective social contract exist without opposing ones to affirm their own internal values? Can such collectives coexist without vying for hegemonic/ideological dominance?