A Tonic to the Empire?: The 1951 Festival of Britain and the Empire-Commonwealth

A unique feat of an economically and physically ravaged post-war Britain, the 1951 Festival of Britain produced an ‘autobiography of a nation’ intended to instill a nationalistic sense of recovery after total war. Centrally located on the South Bank, the Festival hosted a series of exhibitions celebrating British achievements in the fields of industry, science, technology, architecture, and the arts. With few exceptions, the vast majority of scholarship assesses the Festival through its national framework, and as an attempt to facilitate post-war economic recovery under the Labour government. This article re-examines the imperial concerns underlying the Festival amidst profound global changes in the post-war era. The ‘centrifugal’ development of the inter- and post-war Commonwealth fatally compromised administrative efforts to cultivate a tonic to the Empire through Festival exhibits. Former colonies and Dominions, emboldened by their independence from the metropole, refused to partake in an event that idealised a modernity that rested only in Britain. Representatives from India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, as new Commonwealth members, dissented against indications of their inferior status. These complications during the Festival's organisation expose the fractures in the transition from an exclusive, British-led Commonwealth to a multiracial Commonwealth.

The Meaningful Body

The question as to how sign processes can be meaningful to artificial agents has been a fundamental one for cognitive science throughout its history, from Turing’s (1950) argument from consciousness, to Searle’s (1980) Chinese room and Harnad’s (1990) symbol grounding problem. Currently, the question is even more pressing in the light of recent developments in AI robotics, specifically in the area of reactive and evolutionary approaches. One would perhaps expect that given the embodied and embedded nature of these systems, meaningful sign processes would emerge from the interactions between these robots and their environment. So far, however, robots seem to lack any sensitivity to the significance of signs. In this chapter we will suggest that the artificiality of the body of current robots precludes the emergence of meaning. In fact, one may question whether the label “embodied” genuinely applies to current robots. It may be more truthful to speak of robots being “physicalized,” given that the types of matter used in creating robots bears more similarity to machines like cars or airplanes than to organisms. Thus, we are driven to an investigation of how body and meaning relate. We suggest that meaning is closely related to the strengths and weaknesses of organic bodies of cognitive systems in relation to their struggle for survival. Specifically, as long as four essential characteristics of organic bodies (autopoiesis, metabolism, centrifugal development and self-organization) are lacking in artificial systems, there will be little possibility of the emergence of meaningful sign processes.