Term 2 Paper Draft

The Future is as Real as the Past

"Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.” As human culture on this planet appears to be reaching a critical historical point, there exists a possibility to change the terms of our engagement with the cosmos in which we inhabit. Computer scientists have long theorised that we are approaching a technological singularity, whereby a machine intelligence will introduce a paradigm shift of unparalleled proportions into human existence. This type of thinking is rife with a fatalism that seems to preclude any sort of intervention in this destiny. It is easier to imagine the end of time than it is to solve the crisis of our time. This form of thinking can also be found throughout texts and work regarding the anthropocene. Within it lies forms of thinking that seem to conclude the finality of the destruction of the planet, and the best we can do at this point is to inspire sympathy with those on the front lines of this environmental catastrophe. In this text I will highlight historical and cultural precedence for alternatives to the control systems that dictate the morphological arena of contemporary thought, and through these examples, offer notions on how these concepts can be used in artistic practice as a salvo against the recent political developments in the western world. The construction of time that stems from the early capitalist systems of western europe to this day dictates the manner in which space is still perceived in western nations. As if there is an implied telos to the nation state, in the supposed greatness of an arbitrary geographical boundary born from bloodshed, institutional racism and colonial theft. Within the political right, in typical hubris, exists this dream of a temporal action where the future becomes more like past and less like the present in order to re-invigorate the class and race hierarchies that allowed for white male supremacy. A central tenet of my argument is the notion that our collective history is best viewed from a non-linear perspective, akin to systems that reach a momentary state of stability. Energy (as metaphor) of various forms is introduced and is leaked from these stable states, which ultimately collapses this form and changes the system into another state. In this manner, the philosophy of history can be seen as an amorphous cycle that does not necessarily build on the previous epochs, and the progression of time does not imply a forward progression of human agency.

At the advent of the theory of evolution, the temporal context of humanity became extended far beyond the limits of memory. This event placed our existence in a continuum of thought outside the lifetime of an individual. Cultural theorist Claire Colebrook suggests that in our current era, the equivalent event is the extinction of the human race – the perception that changes to the planet could bring about the end of our species. This awareness gives opportunity to domesticate this sense of an ending to the the historical emergence of the human species, where declarations of ideas of "post-humanism" ultimately deny the immensity of the truth of extinction. This process of normalisation of planetary crisis is problematic in the sense of objectivity. Placing the planetary ecology as a self-contained perfectly balanced autonomous system writes humanity out of the equation, and allows for a unreal objectifying gaze at "nature". Within this tendency it can be surmised that placing human actors with eons and time scales akin to planetary ecology, the non-linear nature of cycles will become apparent. In the shattering truth of extinction becoming reality, perhaps this realisation could break down the obstacles to genuine ecological awareness. Instead of expecting nature to have stability, order, and regularity, grounding can be found in an extra-territorial level.

Throughout non-western cultures there exists a wholly different view of time contradictory to the linearity of western thought. In the Andean altiplano, the Ayamara have a completely reversed notion of time, in that the past is in front of them, and the future behind. This idea begs the question what if the future is as real as the past. Key to many of the cosmologies is the notion that time and space exist in a cyclical manner. Component to this manner of thinking is the central concept of a holistic unity between all things, where an individual's corporeal existence is no greater or less than that of a tree, a river or the entire universe itself. Analogues to this notion can be found in cybernetic theory. The cyborg becomes present where the border between human and non-human is breached. Ambiguity now exists between natural and artificial, mind and body, previously clearly defined areas that differentiated the inanimate from the animate. The boundary between physical and non-physical is tenuous at best. Information as data packets transcending physical geography through sections of the electromagnetic spectrum give cyborgs the essence of fluidity. The cyborg dream is everywhere and invisible, as difficult to comprehend politically as materially. This allows them to be used as oppositional strategies by those marginalised by the militant order of masculine labour. Within both of these tendencies, a relationship can be seen in a non-linear interpretation of time, and therefore space. In considering an image, they are fixed light patterns as messages for the future that exist in non-linear time, containing varied temporalities and result in cultural impact blending time through memory. "It is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space".

A crucial example of dissolving the bondage of western time and space is the Afrofuturist movement. Displaced from ancestral lands and history through the slave trade, black artists, primarily in america, redefined a future history through art and music. "A techno-visionary tradition that looks as much toward sci-fi futurism as toward magical African roots. This loosely gnostic strain of Afro-diasporic science fiction emerges from the improvised confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World..." Arising from the ruins of the neoliberal project in the city of Detroit, techno musicians appropriated the robotic sounds of automated car production with drum machines and synthesizers. The duo Drexciya embodied this spirit. In the liner notes of their album "The Quest", they outlined their future history through a retelling of the slave trade. "During the Middle Passage, many pregnant women, sick or dying or simply too much trouble for their captors, were thrown overboard. The fetuses in their wombs, still accustomed to a liquid environment, survived. They thrived, in fact, growing fins and gills, and made their home in the ruins of an underwater city, where they mounted their counter-offensive against human greed and stupidity."

From the military industrial complex comes another interesting example of the use of considering planetary time scales. When faced with the potential catastrophe component to stockpiling nuclear waste that would last for eons, the US military, in typical hubris, sought to engineer a solution that would speak to the future (while the most obvious solution, not using nuclear fuel and weapons, seemed to be lost on them.) So the Human Interference Task Force was created, involving a variety of experts in semiotics and cultural anthropology to create a solution whereby knowledge could be passed on through generations informing societies that these massively toxic waste dumps had to be avoided, given that perhaps language and symbology would morph into communication forms that would render current visual language useless. One of the groups, revealing the ridiculous bias of a group like this, prophesied a future where feminists had taken over the planet, and would disregard anything from the "male dominated past", therefore the entire study was moot. However, akin to the potential liberation that cyborg technology offers in spite of its defence-contracted patriarchy, even some good things can come from military industry. One of the groups envisaged a future where genetically engineered cats would glow when exposed to radiation. Having a history of cohabitation with humans, the group would seed a mythology throughout a variety of cultures in song, poetry and art that would imbue a sense of danger and fear when a glowing cat would be encountered. Recognizing the power of myth in society, and it's trans-temporal potentiality reveals an inherent motivation deep within human experience for the reverence of common experience that transcends the compartmentalized experience of industrial time. Threads can be traced from the origins of society that are present today in archetypes, and there exists a vast area of possibility for the networked existence to re-encode these symbols.

A similar line of thought can be seen in minimalist movement of the 70's. Earthworks such as "Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson speak to a timeframe that works within the global aeon of the flux of continents and oceanic water levels. When reading these works, it is important to recognise the presence of the moment involved in the contemplation. Infinite time expands from either side of this moment, so the only relevance exists in this crucial now. Expanding the relevance of what entails a momentary collapse of time can be seen in the work of Forensic Architecture, under the guidance of Eyal Weizman. Their work seeks to unravel the biases, historical context, and geopolitical foundations that are used in the defence of the hyperviolent occupation of Palestine and other conflict zones around the world. By delving deep into the artifactual evidence of moments in time captured by drones, smartphones, and other purveyors of contemporary truth, they are able to call out the lies perpetrated by the military forces. Eyal Weizman references the "split second", often used in court to defend officers reacting in the moment of violence. The split second is an indivisible unit of time, but in fact, it is a hyperlink to history, where colonial, racial, and economic bias spread across history to unite into the moment of an individual's action. This type of non-linear thinking is a remarkable indicator of the relevance of viewing the human condition as a complex web of intertwining continuum that spread in a cyclical manner across space-time. Perhaps in the future the cyborg reality will literally collapse our perspective into the ability to interpret time as a non-causal agent, but in the current condition these aforementioned examples give credence to the possibilities at our disposal.

References

Colebrook, C (2012) "Framing the end of the Species", Extinction, Ed. Claire Colebrook, Open Humanities Press
DeLanda, M (2000) "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History", Swerve Editions
Dery, M (2002) "Black to the Future, Afro Futurism 101", Rhizome Journal
Foucault, M (1984) "Des Espace Autres", Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité
Head, A (2016) "Here Comes Trouble", ZK/U Press
Haraway, D (1991) "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", Routledge
Mirzoeff, N (2017) "Below the Water, Black Lives Matter and Revolutionary Time", e-flux Journal #79
Marker, C (1983) "Sans Soleil", Film
Matts, T (2012) "The Melancholy of Extinction", M/C Journal, Vol 15, No 3
Sebeok, T (1984) "Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millenia", Research Centre for Language and Semiotics, US Dept. of Energy
Weizman, E (2017) "Strategies of Counter Mapping" Sonic Acts Conference