96 | What is Utopia? Part IV. Bacon's New Atlantis
Added 2024-08-28 04:43:46 +0000 UTCIn this episode we talk about the weird little unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis, written by founding enlightenment figure Francis Bacon. We talk about his fetish for differential novelty, his understanding and valorization of knowledge production, and his ambivalent status as a pivotal figure between medieval and modern science. He’s right that European rationality is sickly, but what can orgiastic science deliver for utopian consciousness? Not clear! But it definitely would be cool to be able to make meteors and multiply natural forms.
This is a patron exclusive episode.
References:
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, in Bacon et. al., Three Early Modern Utopias (New York: Oxford, 2009).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN
Comments
Thank you as always for a rich conversation! I recently heard of Vine Deloria's politics of power of place (vs power of time, ie immortal colonial empires possessing a kind of expanding temporal dominion)... and appreciating all that you named about how this fictitious "super/perfected europe" exists elsewhere/elsewhile and not in Europe's actual future with any kind of description of the society's political mechanics or an explanation of arriving there... Bacon is all science, no socialism!
O
2024-09-14 03:56:10 +0000 UTCLike to see Bacon’s reaction to the Pink Floyd laser light shows I watched in 8th grade at the local science museum
Sam Schick
2024-08-28 16:35:51 +0000 UTC
