Following the event, a report entitled ‘Situating Korean Fine Art Practice in a Western Context’ written by Dr John Cussans came to our attention. It is attached here, many thanks to John for making it available, and our apologies for the delay in posting it:

SITUATING KOREAN FINE ART

David Cunningham’s review of Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Literature, published in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, is currently up as a freebie on the website. You can read it here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/flaubert%e2%80%99s-parrot

David Cunningham’s 2005 essay ‘The Concept of Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form’, originally published in Radical Philosophy, has been translated into Portuguese by Luciana Rocha for the Brazilian journal Revista Periferia.

Any Portuguese readers can see it here: http://www.febf.uerj.br/periferia/index.html

A quick plug for a superb blog by IMCC affiliate Emma McEvoy, about late eighteenth-century gothic music and performance, on Stirling’s The Gothic Imagination site. As Glennis Byron puts it in the Comments: ‘The post, is, people, pretty amazing … As we plod along, talking about Twilight and True Blood and Zombies and all that ephemeral rubbish, and repeating the same old points about gothic over and over and over and over, some people are actually doing real research’. Read it here.

David Cunningham’s essay ‘Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel’, published in the September issue of Radical Philosophy, is now available online as a pdf on the journal’s Recent Highlights page of their website.

Download it here.

Update: David will be speaking on Philosophy, Capitalism and the Novel at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 24 November (4-6pm). He’ll also be in Glasgow on Thursday 25 giving a talk on the concept of modernism.

In the interests of Open Access, we are very pleased to attach Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (Sage, 2008), a PDF of the IMCC Director Marq Smith’s book of interviews with Mieke Bal, Giuliana Bruno, Mark Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Susan Buck-Morss, Lisa Cartwright, Lennard J. Davis, Hal Foster, Paul Gilroy, Martin Jay, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Peggy Phelan, and Vivian Sobchack. Enjoy, and feel free to circulate.

Last Friday 14th May saw the launch of the Architectural Association’s City Cultures project, to which the IMCC’s David Cunningham has been a contributor. The texts from the project, including David’s ‘Nine Theses on the Metropolis’, can be read or downloaded here.

The AA have also posted a video recording of the launch event on their website, with brief talks from David, Doug Spencer, Peter Carl, and others, at: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1230

For those interested, an earlier talk on Metropolitics by David at the AA, as part of their Landscape Urbanism Public Lectures series, is also up on their website. Watch it here.

The third and final part in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. Here’s Stephen Melville’s paper, which constituted a fitting finale to the series. Is the future now?

4. The Future is Now, Now is the Future
Stephen Melville

The two earlier discussions in this series that I was able to attend both seemed to turn quite strongly on a contrast between modern and postmodern representations of the future, more or less as they appear to line up with the contrast between so-called Golden Age and New Wave science fiction. It’s been hard for me, at least, not to hear bits of Beckett stammering in the background, so I was happy to hear Krapp’s Last Tape surface briefly on Saturday. The overall contrast seemed, roughly, one between a future fully distinct from the present and underwritten by a certain faith in science, and a future underwritten by technology and threatened with imminent collapse into the present (or, as one speaker put it, having the shape of an endless intensification of the present) – thus tending also toward a contrast between the utopian and the simulacral, as well as between progress and repetition, and – at least I’ve tried to suggest this – between a certain assumption of shared human being or community and a skepticism about other minds registered, among other places, in a shift in the understanding of the material basis or medium specificity of film from a photographic practice to a form of animation. This last maybe permits an expansion of the postmodern/New Wave text to take account of our apparent current interest in various forms of the undead, and most notably the emergence of the postmodern speed zombie. Neither of these representations seems satisfactory: the Golden Age is, as it were, too much future and in that sense doomed to fail, while the New Wave seems finally not a future at all. Both politics and religion have remained for the most part discreetly in the background, especially religion – which is odd to the extent that one of our continuing interests in the future is, I think, broadly redemptive (certainly notions of apocalypse and the post-apocalyptic, of things more or less shaped like the end of history or the end of the world have put in appearances). It’s perhaps worth opening the contrast a little further off its native ground by taking note of the evident difference between a modern stock market in which one invests for a future that must be awaited, and a postmodern stock market in which futures themselves become a primary commodity and one dreams – sometimes of course in real money – of a present profit made by strip-mining the contingency of the future. Our moment seems to be one that wants to read the phrase ‘the future is now’ – a phrase that I think goes back to the 1950s as a way of naming the new marvels of the present – as ‘now is the future,’ thus as a promise of no more marvels.

What is it for us, now, to talk of the future? If we have lost our marvels, do we want them back? Do we want some assurances about what follows if there is, now, no future? Do we rehearse these representations to ourselves in hopes of dispelling them, gaining or regaining access to an agency that feels somehow denied to us? Or do we perhaps rehearse them to maintain ourselves in just such denial? Do we want to know what time will tell? Stanley Cavell writes, ‘But my question is: What will time tell? That certain departures in art-like pursuits have become established (among certain audiences, in textbooks, on walls, in college courses); that someone is treating them with the respect due, we feel, to art; that one no longer has the right to question their status? But in waiting for time to tell that, we miss what the present tells …’

In advanced physics, as I gather, time at a certain point drops out of the equations – it’s in this sense not one of the deep features of a universe that by itself evidently knows no future. The future, then, appears to be our problem, and it may seem that ‘the future’ as we speak of it and admit an interest in it is first of all a matter of what we cannot know – the future matters because, like death, it is an unknown country. But this is maybe not as true as it sometimes sounds: I get out of the way of the falling piano because I know what’s going to happen, and a lot of my day and your day is filled with such incidents just as life is filled with unknowns that have nothing to do with the future. The problem, or interest, of the future is more nearly ethical than epistemological.

Kant, writing about art, claims that original works are exemplary: that is, that originality is the capacity to demand imitation, to engender new rules to be followed. Who makes art now with the aim of rendering the future answerable to it? What would we make of a form of life in which such promising had come to an end? A promise is a form of speech in which one binds oneself in time, binds oneself to time. There’s a lot to be said for the thought that we speak of the future because speech is the real home of the future, which is, in the end, not a thing or a space but a tense – or, more fully, the ongoing precipitate of the play of tense and mood within our acts of speech. That is, I suppose, one way to mean that the future is now – that it is in our present speaking, in the promises our words variously secure and offer.

Seeing this helps, I think, get at what is perhaps the deepest stake in our worries about the future: that what seems its emergent shape is such as to deprive us of our experience in the present, or (it’s the same thing) confine our experience to the terms of a present cut off from either past or future and thus obliged to imagine them only either as other places to which we have no access or as already wholly swallowed up by a present, which only ever vanishes and so is only every lost to us. One major response to this is to cling more tightly than ever to just that vanishing present, to insist on the punctuality and ineffability of experience, as if representation and articulation were not only alien but hostile to it. We keep our experience safe at the cost of never actually having it, monumentalizing its force while refusing it consequence. These are, I take it, ways of putting the stakes of what Derrida called the critique of presence and of what Foucault came to understand as the question of power. It’s certainly a version of Michael Fried’s controversial critique of minimalism: Tony Smith’s Die just is for him the monumentalization of an experience at once claimed and evaded, had only as that evasion.

Different as their intellectual idioms are Cavell and Fried, Derrida, and Foucault, all write from deep within a sense of what I think can only be called the absoluteness of the present – which cannot mean its isolation from past and future but its continuous unfolding into and thus radical responsibility for them. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, writing on Hegel, who is always lurking somewhere in the shrubbery when it comes to questions of the future, ‘What is asked of thought, consequently, is nothing other than this: to not give up on the inscription of the absolute in the present, such that no present, whatever its form (past, present, or to come) is absolutized.’

In an early essay on Beckett’s Endgame, Cavell suggests that one way to understand the play’s setting is as Noah’s ark after the flood, which would be to take the finishing enacted out there as the inauguration of the post-lapsarian world we still inhabit. But of course there’s plenty in the play to suggest that its world is just ours in its present or nearly present—say, future—ending. That’s been, with good reason, the dominant reading of the play—so if we are to given Cavell’s proposal its due weight, we may want to say that Endgame offers the world as at every moment ending and opening onto itself – is, that is, one attempt to make out what it means to inscribe the absolute in the present, to imagine an ordering of time and possibility inseparable from its speaking – and if that’s right, surely one of its lessons, that goes down into the smallest details of its staging, of its impossible decisions about tone and pace and expressivity, must surely be about how deep the bite of obligation – of promise, redemption, futurity – cuts into our words.

Cavell’s thought here – which seems to me exactly right – is that the problem Beckett’s characters have with language is not that it is or has become meaningless, but that it is all too full of meaning, so what Endgame places under scrutiny is our desire to be done with meaning, to become a present unshadowed by the future.

The second part in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. Here’s Garin Dowd’s paper from the final night, seamlessly drifiting from Beckett to Ballard, Deleuze to Daney.

3. ‘Replay: conducts of time x 4 (interstitial pedagogies)’
Garin Dowd

I borrow the idea of conducts of time from Eric Alliez. Conducts would refer to behaviours – and suggest an ethology – but also to channels. Conducts of time are also ‘gaits’ of time, postures of time in movement; equally they might inhere in the pas au-delà, the step which is also a pas – a not, in Jacques Derrida’s formulation (via Blanchot). Conducts of time may give rise to systole or diastole, to condensations and saturations, as in running on the spot, and to disseminations. It may produce reifications and consolidations, or it may liberate blocs of becoming.

The action of Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape is famously set, according to the stage directions, on ‘a late evening in the future’. While it is anecdotally recorded that the motivation behind this direction was Beckett’s concern that, without such a prompt, what would be required of the audience is the performance of the retrospective science fiction to permit tape recorders to exist prior to their invention (the aged Krapp listens to a recording of himself aged 39, while the play was first staged in 1958), there seems to be much more at play than simply a peculiar concession to verisimilitude. Nonetheless the precession, at once announced and elided by Krapp’s Last Tape, of this particular archival technology, reminds one also that it is the cataloguer of the famous precession of simulacra, Jean Baudrillard, who tells us much, inadvertently, about Beckett’s concerns in this play. In La Gauche Divine we read that ‘le rêve d’une conductibilité absolue [de l’information] ne peut etre qu’excrémentiel’: the dream of an absolute conductibility [of information] can only be excremental. The dream of an absolute conductibility of information is also the predicament or the opportunity of the protagonist in Krapp’s Last Tape. How to phrase; how to gather; how to memorialise ‘eschatologically’ (his last tape) and/or scatalogically (his ‘unattainable laxation’): these issues trouble Krapp, and trouble him in a way which is, in Derrida’s sense, archival. In this respect the play reminds us of what Derrida identifies as the archive’s relationship to the future: ‘the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future’. So on our particular late evening in the future, the future now or round about now, I want to introduce 4 conducts of time.

Conduct 1: Shelter

This exhibition does not come from an empty place. There is only the plenum of the story which names the event, ‘Sculpture of the Space Age’, and which does not describe it. The idea of the exhibition provides a frame for Ballard to fill it up with what Zadie Smith, in a recent essay, identifies as plot, characters and as she puts it ‘weirdness’. The weirdness of Ballard is of course mere perversion: mere perversion in its strict and spare Freudian definition, namely deviation from a goal and the exploration of such deviations. Deviations induce, inter alia, delay, detour and dalliance. A recent film which owes much to Ballard’s imagination, and in particular to Concrete Island, Ursula Meier’s Home (2008) emphasises this aspect, which can be said to describe, on one level, the thematic concerns and, on another, the style of Ballard’s writing. In Home (not to be confused with the BBC Ballard adaptation of the same title) the world as networked by modern transport had produced its own moment of seizure, or nullifying arresting excess: a motorway had been built and abandoned. As Meier’s account puts it: ‘An empty four-lane highway stretches out as far as the eye can see across the peaceful and deserted countryside. Built several years ago, it has since then been left in disuse. On the very edge of the weed-ridden asphalt, a mere few feet away from the guard rails, sits a totally isolated house with its small garden. The house harbours a family’.

This motorway had, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, maintained its potential, which he defines, following Aristotle, as its potential not to be. The Aristotelian definition of potentiality means that potentiality embraces the possibility of not-being, of not to be. This is the potentiality that cannot pass into actuality. The passing over into actuality only occurs when the potential not-to-be is left behind. In Home the little patch or plot of utopia (and in the strict sense this is atopia – without place, placelessness) of the house which the family never moved out of and which waited, then saw the cars never came, and so who waited some more, until finally they hear the imminent opening announced on the radio. In the end the potentiality is cancelled out and the cars arrive.

Conduct 2: interstitial pedagogy

This current exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation – Sculpture of the Space Age – is the product of a curatorial imagination coupled with what I want to call an ‘interstitial pedagogy’. I wish to name it interstitial for a number of reasons. The exhibition is conjured into being by the curator, and the artists whose work is on display here, out of the inviting and invented ‘interstice’ in Ballard’s story, and it is in part determined by the logic of what if? The interstice causes the ‘what ifs’ to proliferate, and in doing so they are true to the spirit of Ballard. Ballard’s work after all produces divergences at the thresholds of passage into dubious consistencies, dubious shelters, and even one might venture, dubious homes and abodes. This story is one of those which invites the term – used by Will Self writing recently in The Guardian of Ballard – luminous. This gives light of a special sort, here found by the curator to dwell even in its occluded non-part – the fictional exhibition. Being a collection of works which retrospectively aspire to the what ifs of this past fictional exhibition, they take place in an imagined absent content or repository – a repository, a curatorial endeavour which Ballard omitted to give us, even in fictive terms. Thus we are in this precarious, provoked now; we are compromised now by this provocation. This exhibition is a deviation, a perverting of the course of the story which left only what it announces as an exhibition as a smoothed-over elision. Which precisely allows that exhibition not to be, which leaves it as potential in the strict Aristotelian sense identified by Agamben. The crossing of the threshold which marks the emptying out of the ‘not’ is of course not the object of the attack of this exhibition, because these works and this work of curatorial arrangement seem to insist that the exhibition be a showing of the continued hollowing out – despite any putative actualisation – of the now, by virtue of a multifaceted undoing: once in the imagined spacing in the Ballard story (which gives the exhibition), then in the curatorial imaginary, then in the works convened in their own singularity (their own ‘whatever’, as Agamben might himself put it), then in the scrutiny and in the ‘suture-futuring’  – I propose this hideous amalgam of Badiou and Ballard – of these interventions.

Conduct 3: YouTube

The Sculpture of the Space Age exhibition is a retrospective science fiction. An event on a theme such as this evening’s, indeed the whole double event of the exhibition and these supplements, has the curious but wonderful effect of reviving other pasts, other possible worlds, other potentials, and it can make the past press forward in compelling, unprepared-for and unheard-of ways. It can make one feel giddy at both the inaccurate and off-target futurologies of ‘Theory’, as when I read Jean-François Lyotard (writing in 1979), or re-read him prompted by the theme of this evening: ‘It is reasonable to suppose that the proliferation of information-processing machines is having, and will continue to have, as much of an effect on the circulation of learning as did advancements in human circulation (transportation systems) and later, the circulation of sounds and visual images (the media)’. Of course Lyotard would go on to curate the exhibition Les immateriaux, which to an extent posited ways of resisting the onslaught of the information society by keeping at work the inoperativity of its potential community. Against frayage and balayage (breaching and scanning), he would later propose the figure of passage (in The Inhuman), the movement beyond and against the mnemotechnical supplement (as Derrida calls it in Archive Fever) of our media complex. Lyotard’s attempt was what the French film critic Serge Daney had already, in another remarkable forecast in 1975 and 1976, named a new pedagogy of perception, a new pedagogy of the image, in the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièlle Huillet and Jean-Luc Godard. Through what he presents as a praxis of the cinematographic image, in the shape of Godard’s ‘interstitial method’ and Straub/Huillet’s disjunctive syntheses of ‘unreconciled’ sound and image components, Daney’s attempts to provide a systematic statement regarding a pedagogy of the image intersect with and enrich Deleuze’s emerging cine-philosophy of the time. Daney’s three ages of cinema are in effect three functions of the image: an encyclopedia of the world (disintegrated into scraps and fragments); a pedagogy of perception; and a professional formation of the eye. In Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? these become the encyclopedia of the world (post-Kantian), pedagogy and commercial professional formation.

Which brings me finally to conduct of time number four and to what the people of this earth call YouTube. On Wednesday I saw the future. And its name was Thierry Henry.

Conduct 4: variation

In sport rules are, in Brian Massumi’s analysis, instances of ‘ex post facto captures that take precedence’. Sport evolves in response to forces of variation asserting themselves, and rules respond to such assertions by means of ‘usurpation’. A new unheard of variation in play emerges which is usurped in the future by an ex post facto capture. In Henry’s comments after FIFA rejected the Irish FA’s appeal for a replay, he argues that television replay and slow-motion replay in particular enable the exaggeration of his intention and distend the time-frame in which, he insists, he was merely intuitively operating. I would want to add that it is more crucially YouTube which multiplies viewership and replayability.

In football every tackle and every instance of ball control is an exercise in awareness and a manipulation of boundaries and limits. For a rare moment in the France-Ireland World Cup qualifying play-off, the ball seemed to stop and fix to Henry, right on the end-line, with his palm perpendicular to the turf; with a palm which became a fence; with a palm which became a manifest boundary and blocked the exit of the ball from the grid, simultaneously blocking the exit of France from the competition. In so doing, however, he merely draws attention to the underlying condition of all play. The ball, Massumi argues, has a certain autonomy: it depends upon the continuum of potential which it doubles, and is nothing without this continuum; yet through the doubling it asserts itself as what he calls a ‘part-subject’: ‘The part-subject catalyses the play as a whole but is not itself a whole. It attracts and arrays the players, defining their effective role in the game and defining the overall state of the game, at any given moment, by the potential movement of the players with respect to it. The ball moves the players. The player is the object of the ball’. As a player he must exploit fault-lines. FIFA just had not yet had reason to consider the miniscule opening for enormous potential in the play of part-object (le main de dieu) and part-subject (ball) at a limit whose play the governing body simply could not see, except now, when it is too late.

Replay

So, to conclude with a few more words on the notion of replaying, and of replaying that which did not occur. Krapp’s Last Tape is concerned, as is Proust’s Recherche, with involuntary memory. By contrast to Proust, here involuntary memory has been deprived of its asynthetic force, and has been yoked – by means of a mnemotechnical supplement – into the domain of the actual, of the current and perhaps of the conductible.  For Deleuze the virtual decribes the assemblage of singularities/events, irreducible to the status of merely ‘what happens’. Thus the virtual consists not only of Leibnizian possible worlds but of possible+incompossible worlds. This is what Deleuze means when he says that the virtual is not the same as the possible. The virtual is actualised in creation, while the possible is constrained by preordained limitation. The first allows multiplicity while the second is conditioned in advance by the One. If we take ‘virtual’ to mean possible+incompossible we are in the realm of the disjunctive synthesis, thus back in the virtual as virtual (and hence real, following Deleuze). The virtual (compossible+incompossible) is neutralised in advance by having already converged with the tape recording. Krapp has a prosthetic facility to conjoin the things separated by the abyss of time. His prosthesis – the tape recordings and player combined – is a time-saving device in this respect (the archive puts in reserve, it saves and stockpiles against the future), not an instrument of passage, wherein time is spent, time spends and is spending. Thus it is correct, as several commentators have done, to speak of Krapp as an anti-Proust. Krapp can be said, following the coinage of Derrida – to be ‘teleprogrammed’.

As promised, we present here the first in a short selection of transcriptions of talks from the recent series on ‘The Future’ at the David Roberts Art Foundation. In the following post we have David Cunningham’s introduction to the series along with Ben Noys’s Ballard paper (which can be found up on his own blog). Further papers by Stephen Melville and Garin Dowd will be posted soon. Enjoy.

1. ‘Introduction: The Tomorrow That Never Was’
David Cunningham 

I want to begin with a short story by the writer William Gibson, entitled ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ and published in 1981. You can read it here. In the story, Gibson’s narrator (a hack photographer) is engaged to work on an illustrated history of ‘American Streamlined Moderne’, with the working title The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was: ‘“Think of it … as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams”,’ one of the story’s characters tells him. ‘And as I moved among these secret ruins’, the narrator continues, ‘I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in.’ Thus progressively propelled into a state of half-paranoiac and half-melancholic delirium, accompanied by hallucinations of a ‘dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era’ – a city ‘soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires’ – the narrator is only finally returned to the sanity of the present by an immersion in the very seediest aspects of a very contemporary reality. 

Gibson’s vision of a ‘lost future’ – ‘segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present’ – is drawn from the imaginary of popular science fiction. Yet it speaks too, I think, to a certain aspect of our relation to modern art and culture far more generally. Certainly it is in this regard that it might be placed alongside the current exhibition, Sculpture of The Space Age, the title of which itself refers to a short story – in this case, J. G. Ballard’s ‘The Object of the Attack’ – and to a purely fictional exhibition which is described as having been held at the Serpentine gallery in the late 1970’s within its pages. Let me quote the show’s curator Raimundas Malasauskas : ‘Sculpture of The Space Age became an anachronism that keeps living on its own ambivalence as something that could have happened, then almost happened again. It openly contains its own possibility and impossibility. … The show looks as if it was installed in the 70s, but will open its door only tomorrow’. Such a conception of the ‘anachronism that keeps living on its own ambivalence as something that could have happened’ seems, neatly, then to tap into a more general aspect of the zeitgeist concerning the contemporary’s relation to the future – one which, at the beginning of the 1980s, Gibson’s short story already reflects. This is a future understood less in terms of that radical creation-through-destruction that would open up the future as a horizon of expectation or anticipation – as it was, say, both for the early 20^th century cultural and political avant-gardes and for many of the writers and filmmakers of popular science fiction’s golden age – than as itself a temporal phenomenon that is to be located, today, within the past itself, and which can only be accessed via some kind of nostalgia for, or archaeological recovery of, ‘the future’ per se: a journey through its ruins.

It is fair to say that much art of the last decade or so has had its face squarely turned towards the past, preoccupied, as it has been, with forms of history, cultural memory, and the archive. But as Shumon Basar points out: ‘Memories and nostalgia are no longer the sole province of the past – the future is just as susceptible to our longing, heart-breaking laments’. As such, a new and distinctive concern with art’s ability to engage the future is apparent within this very turn to cultural memory and the archive as well. Indeed, as the title of one recent piece by the Austrian artist Dorothee Golz would have it, the fascination with the past is, for many artists and writers today, clearly itself a ‘looking back to the future’, which can – such works would often seem to say – now only be located and recovered retrospectively (whether in the early twentieth-century avant-gardes or in the stylised utopias of a cold war modern or in the electric dreams of late 1970s and early 1980s synth pop).

There are some obvious reasons for this. Modernity is hardly our antiquity, as some have claimed – a basic category mistake, if ever there was one – yet it is undeniably the case that as inhabitants of the twenty-first century we live among a proliferating number of ruins of at least certain ideas and images of the modern, and of the futures that they promised. Unsurprisingly, then, as an era – in the European and North American ‘west’ at any rate – ours seems most obsessed with the energies contained in those futures that precisely never happened, that failed ever to arrive. (This is perhaps one reason, for example, why Walter Benjamin – fixated, as he was, in the years leading up to the Second World War, on the latent utopias and stalled alternative futures of modernity’s own nineteenth-century history – should be the patron saint of so much contemporary theory.) By contrast, for most early twentieth-century avant-gardes, in the words of one Russian movement, it could be taken for granted that, in the most direct of fashions: ‘The future is our only goal’. This was a future that was near visible, on its way, just over the horizon. Perhaps most importantly, it was in such an opening to the future – in its capacity to propel itself towards it – that art’s potential for politicisation was located, from the avant-gardes of Russian Constructivism to Surrealism and beyond. (Indeed, post-Burger, it seems to me that this is precisely the way in which we need now to re-think the concept of the avant-garde itself, as, above all, a concept of time. But that’s another story…) The Futurists, argues Julia Kristeva, ‘heard and understood the Revolution only because its present was dependent on a future’. Today, it is this that reappears, under very changed conditons, in the far more troubled responses of contemporary artists to the neoliberalist claim that ‘there is no alternative’. The apparently futural political slogan of the World Social Forums – ‘Another World is Possible’ – as, say, it was unfurled on banners, above the heads of metropolitan commuters, in a 2002 art event by the Russian Collective Radek, evidently seeks, for instance, to situate itself within a long line of speculative resistance to the ongoing repetition of the ever-same, from which art’s modernity can hardly be separated.

This is simply to say that: if the early Soviet avant-gardes immediately following the 1917 revolution – and their allies in Weimar Germany and elsewhere – felt themselves to be particularly ‘pregnant with the future’ it was, of course, because of a genuinely unique situation in which artists could truly believe that, in the words of Liubov Popova: ‘We shall build the new world’. Such hardly needs saying. Tatlin’s constructivist tower, his famous Monument to the Third International, is exemplary – all-too-exemplary – of such a kind of paradoxical early twentieth-century monument, not to a glorious past, but to the future: an expression, as Fredric Jameson puts it in another context, of ‘the demands of a collective life to come’. Yet, today, it would be hard to deny that a work such as the Monument has become a monument in quite a different way.

In fact, like the images produced by Gernsbeck’s science fiction illustrators, Tatlin’s Monument has seemed increasingly to take on an iconic historical significance, not in the power of its futural demand as such, but precisely in its being unbuilt (and perhaps unbuildable outside of the future forms of social organisation it envisaged) – thereby all-too-easily symbolising, for us, both the ultimate failure of its collective ambitions and its ongoing critical judgement upon a present in which the catastrophe is simply that ‘things’ continue to ‘go on as they are’, as Benjamin once put it. In this, perhaps, it belongs with the adult’s question directed to the once promised future of his or her childhood: ‘where is that rocket backpack that I was promised by TV?’ And like the personal rocket pack, the point about the image of Tatlin’s tower is, of course, that it precisely is a cliché of such discussions: at worst, a now useful exemplar for conservative arguments concerning the inevitable naivety and failure of all utopian impulses. A more interesting point might be that precisely as an image it is increasingly becoming more or less indistinguishable from those of popular science fiction.

That Ballard’s fictional exhibition, Sculpture of The Space Age, should be set in the 1970s seems, thus, significant in this regard – in that, retrospectively, it comes towards the very end of that era of what Reyner Banham called the Machine Age preceding our own. As in the work of Banham’s contemporaries Archigram, Gernsbeck’s blimps and zeppelins still fly benevolently here, still bringing the future in their wake.

In his memoir Miracles of Life, published in 2008, Ballard himself recalls visiting the famous 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, This is Tomorrow (also seemingly alluded to in many of the pieces in this exhibition), with which Banham, along with many others of that generation, was involved – and which helped to spawn the pop technological imaginings of Archigram, among others. Bringing together the avant-garde and popular sci-fi – in a show that included both Robbie the Robot and Marcel Duchamp – and which projected the shiny deamworlds of pop art glamour and fun, as well as the anxious look ahead of the Smithsons’s design of a ‘terminal hut’ for post-nuclear habitation, This is Tomorrow is the real ‘tomorrow that never was’ that haunts both Ballard’s later fiction and the Sculpture of The Space Age today. In its anachronism it lives on.

What, then, are we to make of this contemporary obsession with such tomorrows that never were? No doubt this rests on an ability still to distinguish between two different modalties of any looking back to the future: on the one hand, the historist-conservative modality, which would deny any future to the present and would use past ‘dreamworlds’ as a stick with which to beat any apsirations toward a better life than that of global capitalism today, and, on the other, the critical modality of an engagement with those pathologies of the present apparent in its ongoing inheritance of past futures, which would, in its acts of re-activation, seek to keep the future alive as a possibility for the present. In the nuances of this differend resides the ‘question of tomorrow’ today that both this exhibition and this series of talks seek to address.

2. ‘Better Living Through Psychopathology’
Benjamin Noys

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me … (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

Continue reading on Ben’s blog here: http://leniency.blogspot.com/2009/11/better-living-through-psychopathology.html

David Cunningham’s 2007 essay on Iain Sinclair, J.G. Ballard and the contemporary novel has been posted by Simon Sellars on his splendid website The Ballardian. Read it here.