[D66] Declaration on the Notion of “The Future”

[J.N.]

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical

1. The Future, culturally speaking, begins with a car crash. Or rather,
an account of one: a disaster always already mediated, archived, and
replayed. “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I,” shouts
Marinetti from the front page of /Le Figaro/ in February 1909. In a few
paragraphs he’ll launch into a lyrical eulogy of arsenals and shipyards
blazing with violent electric moons, of factories, trains, steamers, and
aeroplane propellers cheering like enthusiastic crowds as they carry us
forward; he’ll incite us to destroy the museums, libraries, and
academies, and inform us that time and space died yesterday. But first,
the car crash has to be narrated. After their frenzied nocturnal pacing
and arguing and their manic and purposeful “scribbling,” the Futurists
(as yet unnamed or unannounced: the future-Futurists) hear famished
automobiles beckon from outside their windows, and throw themselves into
the driving seats. Curling watchdogs under the burning tires of his,
facing down death at every turn, Marinetti hurtles toward two cyclists
wobbling in the road “like two equally convincing but nevertheless
contradictory arguments”—that is, embodying the old cultural order and
its foibles (reason, logic). Pulling up short, he veers, upturned, into
a ditch, whose industrial sludge he laps up lovingly, since “it reminded
me of the breast of my Sudanese nurse.”

6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects
the /idea/ of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of
dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief Philosopher
Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal versions of
capitalism and democracy present themselves as an inevitability, a
destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this ideology of the
future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and
of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative
landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking
which turns its back on the future.

7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s /Angelus Novus/—a floating figure
who stares intently at something he’s moving away from—the angel of
history faces backward. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” writes
Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” What we call progress,
Benjamin calls “the storm.”
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