Stephen Crook - Hobart as a Postmodern City 汉译

On the face of it, Hobart is a strange place in which to write a book about post-modernization. It is the capital of Tasmania, the smallest, most southerly and only island state of Australia. It is situated on the estuary of the river Derwent, and we look down the estuary from our offices to the expanse of the Southern Ocean which extends, uninterrupted by land, to Antarctica. Tasmania’s extreme geographical marginality often seems to be reflected in an extreme social conservatism. What are coyly referred to as “homosexual acts” remain illegal in the state, and condom vending machines only recently ceased to be so. By contrast, guns (unlike fireworks) are readily available to anyone over the age sixteen with the money to pay for them. But this is not the whole story about Tasmania. Hobart is indistinguishable in many respects from any other late modern, or early postmodern city. Its suburbs nestle around air-conditioned shopping malls; its urban landscape is dotted with the familiar icons of Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut outlets; its radio and television stations transmit sounds and images which would be instantly recognized in Melbourne, Miami or Manchester. There are even sense in which Tasmania sets the pace of global change. The United Tasmania Group of the 1970s has a claim to be the world’s first “green” political debate, and the present state Labor administration holds office only with the support of a group of green parliamentarians. In short, “marginality” is no longer an entirely self-evident category. We have found the paradoxical and volatile mix of past, present and possible futures which marks our state to be a suggestive background for our reflections on postmodernizing change, change which seems simultaneously to disrupt, accelerate and reverse the developmental logic of modernization.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

In another, more immediate, sense our teaching and research has formed the context from which the book has emerged, It became clear to us that our diverse interests in culture, state, inequality, social movement, organizations and science were converging on a concern with patterns of change in contemporary advanced societies. From this realization came the idea for a book in which a general account of postmodernizing change would be put to work in our individual areas of interest. While the book is conceived as much more than a series of unconnected essays, we have not attempted to apply the general account in a rigid, mechanistic, way. The reader will find that different dimensions of postmodernizing processes are emphasized in different chapters according to the peculiarities of the subject matter. The greater part of Chapter 1 was designed and written by Waters, although Crook and Pakulski also contributed sections and proposed amendments to successive drafts. The other chapters have been subjected to a rather less exhaustive process of collective revision. Crook bears responsibility for Chapters 2,7 and 8; Pakulski for Chapters 3 and 5; and Waters for Chapters 4 and 6.