[D66] [JD: 142] Declaration of the Notion of The Future | Believer Magazine

[R.O.]

believermag.com
<https://believermag.com/declaration-of-the-notion-of-the-future/>


  Declaration of the Notion of The Future - Believer Magazine

by International Necronautical Society
18-22 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

TYPE: /INS declaration/
AUTHORIZED: /First Committee, INS/
AUTHORIZATION CODE: /TMcC010910/
DOCUMENT FOLLOWS

The International Necronautical Society now entering its eleventh year,
the First Committee has recently come under pressure to release, in
keeping with the INS’s avant-garde demeanor, some kind of “statement”
both assessing the organization’s achievements and prognosticating for
its future. Both these impulses we reject.

As for the first: What would it mean to speak “of” the INS’s first ten
years? To speak above them, overdub? The commentary might include an
account of the distribution of the Founding Manifesto at London’s
Articultural Fair of 1999; of swift uptake of the Manifesto’s
propositions by the art world and its institutions; of a string of
ever-more-ambitious projects—hearings, publications, radio broadcasting
units running out of Moderna Museet Stockholm and the Institute of
Contemporary Arts London (the “black boxes,” as they have become known);
of Declarations hosted by Tate Britain and the Drawing Center in New
York; of less-voluntary hostings of our propaganda channels by the BBC
and other media outlets, whose websites we have intermittently co-opted;
and, finally, of historicization—of inclusion as a study-object on the
syllabi of art schools.

But what would be the good of such a commentary? To count the scratches
one has made across a strip of film assumes that one can step outside
the film and hang it up to dry, pegged by quotation marks. An error of
scale and a conceptual failing, too: the film is everywhere, always,
already—and our aim should be to render it all scratches.

Should we speak, then, of the future? This might appear a more
avant-garde undertaking. Yet we reject it, too, even more vehemently.
Why? Because the concepts, presumptions, and ideologies embedded in this
overstuffed and lazy meme—“The Future”—are in need of an urgent and
vigorous demolition. Such a demolition is the task this Declaration sets
itself. Its contents should, like all INS propaganda, be repeated,
modified, distorted, and disseminated as the reader sees fit.

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.”

2. To unpick the complexities of Marinetti’s document would take more
space than we have here—indeed, it could take a lifetime. But let’s flag
up three things: Firstly, that at the break of the “very first dawn,”
the moment of rupture with all pasts, lies an almost Proustian moment of
nostalgia. Beyond its racial and colonial overtones, the maid’s
remembered breast serves as a sticky, black madeleine. Secondly (and
following the Proust-line), that the “event” of Futurism, of futurity,
is so tied up with its own writing as to form a matryoshka doll of
almost infinite regress: the text narrates the night during which the
text was written, both containing and interrupting one another. Thirdly
(and following the line of interruption), that the roaring surge toward
the future is arrested no sooner than it begins: Tomorrow’s avant-garde
derails itself, and celebrates this derailment in the moment it
announces itself, as though the derailment formed part of its raison
d’être. The crash dramatizes the larger ontological impossibility of
Marinetti’s claim: if time and space died yesterday, then where and what
is the tomorrow into which we should be moving? The straight path, the
highway leading to the future, disappears; what remains is an imploded
mulch of pasts and presents, a quite literal /entrenchment;/ even more
literally, what remains, precedes, and entirely encloses the event
(while simultaneously being partially enclosed by it) is a document, a
text—the real black liquid in which Marinetti’s impetus embeds itself,
ultimately, is ink—a text that bears within it a catastrophe.

3. Listen: the world is a sign of restless visibility, greater than six
miles.

4. It is this organization’s strong contention that our current age—call
it “modernity,” “late capitalism,” or the seventh phase of pre-thetan
consciousness, according to your disposition—has to be understood
through the lens of catastrophe. This is both necessary and impossible:
how could we stand /outside/ or /beyond/ the catastrophe? Conversely, it
is equally impossible to penetrate its core, experience it fully, merge
with it. To phrase it in temporal terms: the time of the catastrophe is
not easily graspable. As Blanchot so eloquently puts it in /The Writing
of the Disaster:/ “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to
situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we
are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply
the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which
does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the
disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we
suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in
which to think it.”

5. The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as
progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to
future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the
Hegelian system, of /Aufhebung,/ in which thought and matter ascend to
the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect
themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian)
idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who
inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base
materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet
Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual
essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to
eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through
which all future plunges to the past.”

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.”

8. Listen: Babble of voices, 90.3 MHz, internal party dissonance.
Several highs from the Atlantic to the Baltic. Ring tones in commercials
and screaming hosts of the new generation.

9. Contemporary intellectual follies, part one: “post-humanism.” The
desire, as expressed, for example, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq,
to leave behind the fury and the mire of human veins, thereby achieving
some imagined “freedom” or “autonomy.” This is not post-anything: it is
merely Humanism 2.0. To rid the self of its contingency, its meshing in
desire and networks of relationships, was humanism’s aspiration in the
first place. It’s a reactionary aspiration, one that forecloses any type
of genuine agency or ethics. As Levinas so convincingly argues, we are
not, nor should we strive to be, discrete or disconnected. As he puts
it: “We exist in a circuit of understanding with reality”; “We have one
finger caught in the machine.”

10. Consider Beckett’s Krapp, lost in his tape archives: the spools, the
reels, the indexes onto which he’s transferred his memories of former
years; his fingers hovering over the play, pause, and rewind buttons.
Technology’s not there to carry him beyond his old condition, but to
return him to it with added intensity. Despite his counting of his
birthdays, one after the other, time, for him, moves not forward but
rather, like the tapes themselves, in a loop.

11. Consider the same author’s Winnie in /Happy Days,/ buried to her
waist in sand as she reenacts the same acts and gestures, day in, day
out. By the second act, she’s buried to her neck. Like Krapp, or
Marinetti in his ditch, her experience is one not of progress but of
entrenchment.

12. Listen: Risperidone and Bupropion for new-onset depression with
psychotic features, Filtering the voice of America. Withered into the air.

13. In 1725, as the Enlightenment was gathering its forces for an
overall assault on human consciousness, the Italian thinker Giambattista
Vico published /The New Science,/ a text that would sit like a time bomb
at the heart of the new ideology, exploding a century and a half later
in the writings of Nietzsche, Spengler, Foucault, and the like. For
Vico, history proceeds in cycles: first comes /corso,/ or “flow,” then
/ricorso/—an ambiguous term that has the double sense of “repetition”
and of “retrial” or “appeal.” The point is that, historically speaking,
we advance not onto new ground but over old ground in new ways: more
consciously, with deeper, more nuanced understanding. In the defining
moment of literary modernism, /Finnegans Wake,/ Joyce will use Vico’s
system as a trellis on which to grow his vision not only of social and
international history but also of culture: both, he tells us in the
novel’s opening sentence (which is also the conclusion of its incomplete
final one), follow a “commodius vicus of recirculation.”

14. Loops, not lines: already for the early Freud, the time, or
temporality, of trauma has the circular structure of a repetition cycle.
By the end of his career, he’ll have extended this traumatic logic to
encompass consciousness tout court: humans are rear-facing
repetition-engines, borne back ceaselessly (as Fitzgerald more lyrically
puts it) into the past.

15. Consciousness, as another of our heroes, William S. Burroughs,
asserts, moves in a seven-second loop, creating temporary bursts of
“now”-ness. Burroughs had a finger caught in the machine as well: he
spent whole months experimenting with reel-to-reel cassettes, recording,
splicing, and transcribing—an extension of the cut-up techniques he had
developed in the old medium of print-on-paper. He believed, not entirely
incorrectly, that since the reality we inhabit is so profoundly shaped
by media organizations, and by the corporate and governmental bodies
hand in hand with which these organizations operate, then to cut into
and rearrange script-sequences of this reality would have the effect of
short-circuiting it, blowing it up: a new catastrophe to counter the
ongoing one of what Burroughs’s counterpart Debord would call “The
Spectacle.” The task, for Burroughs or Debord, is not simply to suggest
future plotlines for the master script, but rather to expose and subvert
the Reality Studio itself. “Let it come down.”

16. In a series of carefully planned and executed media interventions
hosted by institutions such as the ICA, the Moderna Museet, Hartware
MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, and others that must remain anonymous, the
INS has deployed Burroughs’s cut-up techniques to produce, by splicing
together phrases harvested from newspapers, websites, meteorological
reports, and other media sources, sequences that were then read over FM
radio. These have been inserted at selected points throughout this
Declaration. Burroughs believed that this process could give one
glimpses of the future—this last term being understood as something not
to come but rather already recorded on another point of the reel being
worked over and savaged by the intervention.

17. Listen: Stockholm, within the umbra, 08:40–09:42. Brain injury to
the right cerebral hemisphere, dark river-nymph, her name is Echo, and
she always answers back, expressed in Terrestrial Dynamic Time. Tomorrow
will be three minutes and fifty-seven seconds longer.

18. Contemporary intellectual follies, part two: neuroscience. Or
rather, the glib wholesale transferral of the logic of neuroscience to
the realm of culture. Another trump card in a narrative of progress that
presents itself as absolute, “objective”: the belief that art and
literature can be “explained” by a discourse that has no bearing on them
whatsoever. As though the endless complexity of thought and
interpretation demanded by /Hamlet/ could be substituted by the act of
taking a biopsy of Shakespeare’s brain, or the interminable challenges
and provocations posed by /Inland Empire/ neutralized by placing
electrodes among Lynch’s strangely coiffured hair. Meaning takes place
in the symbolic, is constantly negotiated through language (be this
spoken or visual), through the dynamism of metaphor, structured by
desire, power, gender, and the rest. This process is open, ongoing,
and—most important—contestable. That’s why we have art in the first place.

19. Listen: Ovid 251 Fight the Chimera. Winds aloft extended decode.
Seminole. Going once going twice.

20. Listen: between cities, countries, and continents, we are going to
crash.

21. To loop back to where we started, to the ink-rich ditch we never
left: the future ends where it begins—or ends before it begins, pre-ends
in anticipation of its eternal recommencement, however you like to put
it—with a car crash. Marinetti’s, Camus’s, James Dean’s, Jayne
Mansfield’s, Princess Grace of Monaco’s, or Graceless and Dumb of
Kensington’s, or the endless anonymous victims who populate the silk
screens of Warhol’s repetition compulsion—the identities, ultimately,
don’t differentiate themselves, any more than do the scraps of wreckage
that pile up before the feet of Benjamin’s angel in the flow and reflow
of the storm.

22. This is why, for us, the truest novel of recent modernity is
Ballard’s /Crash./ At the book’s outset he makes two claims: firstly,
that we are already surrounded by fictions (lifestyle models, fantasies,
sexual roles and identities, all pumped at us, à la Debord/Burroughs, by
the media); the writer’s task, he claims (and here we could extend
“writer” to encompass artists of all sorts), “is to invent the reality.”
This claim we find extremely compelling. The second, less so: Ballard
asserts that the ultimate aim of /Crash/ is to serve as a warning
against “that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons… from the
margins of the technological landscape.” The assertion is unconvincing
not simply because the mode throughout /Crash,/ far from being one of
warning or disgust, is one of lyric celebration (of dented faces lit by
broken rainbows, delicate latticeworks of blood and engine fuel burning
in wayside ditches), but also because the novel is obsessed not with any
kind of future, dystopian or otherwise, but rather with archives.
Vaughan, the central character, gathers research documents from
road-research laboratories and reports from forensic journals and from
stolen doctors’ logbooks. He collects films of test collisions, which he
plays again and again and again. He follows crash victims around armed
with a camera, collating albums full of photographs. He is, above all, a
curator. “Ballard,” the narrator-character, sees in the dents in
windshields records of the people who’ve crashed through or into them;
after his accident he describes himself, using Krapp-like diction, as
“an emotional cassette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain
and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives—the television
newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police
brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV as we masturbated
one another.”

23. And—here’s the genius of /Crash/—out of this landscape rises the
event: the überaccident that fails to take place, that occurs precisely
because it doesn’t happen. Vaughan’s ultimate goal is to die in a
head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor at the precise moment of orgasm.
He spends months planning it, down to the last, minutest detail (working
out at what time she’ll be passing such and such a spot, the approach
angle his car must take toward hers, and so on). But, disastrously, he
gets it wrong and misses her car by inches; subsequently, while Taylor
stands alone, frozen in ambulance light, touching her gloved hand to her
throat, he drowns in his own blood. Vaughan, who has been in thousands
of car crashes, has met with his first accident.

24. This, perhaps, approaches what we’re trying to feel our way toward:
the breach, the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned,
the departure from the script. To put it in fashionable Badiouan, the
Event. The INS believes in the Event—in the power of the event, and that
of art, to carry that event within itself: bring it to pass, or hold it
in abeyance, as potentiality. And, paradoxically, the best way that art
can do this is by allowing itself to be distracted, gazing in the rear
view mirror.

25. A footnote on Ballard: When, in 2006, a range of writers,
scientists, artists, architects, and misc. were asked to contribute a
sentence each to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s reader on the Future, J. G.’s
cleaned the floor with all the rest. While they came up with sweeping,
visionary statements on technology, society, the virtual, and every
other futurological motif, Ballard confined himself to four words: “The
Future is boring.”

26. Listen: Radio Essen, 102.2, from the Atlantic to the Ostsee. /Mich
aber umsummet die Bieen./ Trumpets, Wupertaal. Reuters, down 48, IBM
down .84, AT&T down .67. The bees hum around me, and where the plowman
makes his furrows, birds sing against the light.

DOCUMENT ENDS

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuxtown.net/pipermail/d66/attachments/20210714/4d36cd73/attachment-0001.html>