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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical">http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical</a><br>
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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 <em>Le Figaro</em> 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.”<br>
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6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects
the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em
style="font-style: italic;">idea</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>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.<br>
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7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy
of History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em style="font-style:
italic;">Angelus Novus</em>—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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