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<h1 class="reader-title">Declaration of the Notion of The Future -
Believer Magazine</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">by International Necronautical
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<p><span>TYPE: </span><em>INS declaration</em><br>
<span>AUTHORIZED: </span><em>First Committee, INS</em><br>
<span>AUTHORIZATION CODE: </span><em>TMcC010910</em><br>
<span>DOCUMENT FOLLOWS </span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>entrenchment;</em> 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.</p>
<p>3. Listen: the world is a sign of restless visibility,
greater than six miles.</p>
<p>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 <em>outside</em> or <em>beyond</em> 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 <em>The Writing of the Disaster:</em> “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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>Aufhebung,</em>
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.”</p>
<p>6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS
rejects the <em>idea</em> 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.</p>
<p>7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s <em>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>11. Consider the same author’s Winnie in <em>Happy Days,</em>
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.</p>
<p>12. Listen: Risperidone and Bupropion for new-onset
depression with psychotic features, Filtering the voice of
America. Withered into the air.</p>
<p>13. In 1725, as the Enlightenment was gathering its
forces for an overall assault on human consciousness, the
Italian thinker Giambattista Vico published <em>The New
Science,</em> 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 <em>corso,</em> or “flow,” then <em>ricorso</em>—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, <em>Finnegans Wake,</em> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Hamlet</em>
could be substituted by the act of taking a biopsy of
Shakespeare’s brain, or the interminable challenges and
provocations posed by <em>Inland Empire</em> 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.</p>
<p>19. Listen: Ovid 251 Fight the Chimera. Winds aloft
extended decode. Seminole. Going once going twice.</p>
<p>20. Listen: between cities, countries, and continents, we
are going to crash.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>22. This is why, for us, the truest novel of recent
modernity is Ballard’s <em>Crash.</em> 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 <em>Crash</em>
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 <em>Crash,</em>
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.”</p>
<p>23. And—here’s the genius of <em>Crash</em>—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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>26. Listen: Radio Essen, 102.2, from the Atlantic to the
Ostsee. <em>Mich aber umsummet die Bieen.</em> 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.</p>
<p><span>DOCUMENT ENDS</span></p>
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