ABSTRACT

This chapter considers in more detail how self-designated 'artistic' creators come to form in mega-events affective communities of interest, thus both transcending and affirming their public perception as disinterested international or local/national human capital. The imagineering of utopia by intellectual elites (re-)constitutes at least two dominant 'belief systems', the ideological and the utopian, with each of them propelling stasis or mobility in society and culture. Artistic utopias of a technological/cinematic range in particular, audio-visualise futural possibilities, thus allowing hard policy-making possibilities to enter the phenomenal world. The chapter examines how the cultural domain of imagineering ipso facto, interacts with territorially defined social norms. The structuralism of Marxist discourse forms a well-established line of critique in the social sciences, but my use of agency-structure variations from other compatible traditions is less obviously problematic in the context of a young federal democracy.