TodayISeeTheFuture
Today I See the Future
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Ten years ago, against that closure of the future, a multiplicity of movements arose which claimed that other worlds were indeed possible. It went by a multitude of names: the 'movement of movements', alter-globalisation, anti-globalisation, the anti-capitalist movement. [...] On the one hand, the movement of movements, compared to those days, appears a spent force; yet the situation it opposed has changed. [...] But this much is clear: the liberal-democratic-free-market-capitalist future that was the only flavour on offer at the turn of the century has gone out of fashion in 2008, and the futures paraded before us all look rather different. [...] Every day there are articles asking what is to come now that the 'American Century' has ended, now that food prices can't be kept in check, climate change rolls on, the world's financial architecture seizes up, oil production finally has peaked' It is ironic that, while on the left it seems impossible to conjure up an image of revolution - a rupture with the past and the end of capitalism ' the FT imagine it all the time. If it happens, it's the end of their readership's power; so they're keen to discuss what to do about it. Or take the new Shell report,Energy Scenarios to 2050. They state boldly that the era of Thatcher's 'There is No Alternative'-doctrine is over. Now the choice is a 'scramble' for resources and some nightmarish Hobbesian war of all against all, or 'blueprints'. That's right, 'blueprints': some sort of organised supra-national planning. Meanwhile on the left, we only seem able to imagine the end of the world as Mad Max-style mayhem arising from our fashionable new friend 'eco-collapse'. [...] But far from heralding capitalism's downfall, these crises are in fact precisely what capital needs to constantly revolutionise itself and the world around it. So why think that now is different? Why think this is a turning point, and not simply another turn of the screw of capital's waves of creative destruction? Are we not all Schumpeterians now? [...] Joseph Schumpeter was an economist who popularised the term 'creative destruction' to describe the regular revolutionising of economic and regulatory structures and institutions needed to ensure new 'long waves' of economic growth. Crises were seen as a helpful way of sweeping away the old and creating room for the new. In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein outlines the way economic crises, natural disasters, and military conflicts have been transformed into moments of creative destruction by neoliberalism over the past 30 years. Turning disaster into an opportunity seems to have become so much a part of neoliberal 'common sense' as to be comparable with US President Nixon's 1971 assertion that - when it came to government intervention into the economy in order to stimulate growth - 'We are all Keynesians now'. The answer lies not in pathological optimism, but in the possibility of crisis management - or its impossibility, as it were. [...] But something very important is lost if we only look from the point of view of what capital has done to produce this situation, and what capital will do to manage it. Crises don't just 'happen' all by themselves; they are also the outcome of struggles that are ongoing and constantly spilling over boundaries and borders. Sometimes these pit different capitalists' interests against one another. [...] If we simply dismiss this process as the way capital reduces the risk of large-scale uprising (by 'buying us off'), then we end up playing the old teleology game, at the expense of other people's lives - 'hang in there, comrades, just one more sacrifice for the revolution!'. [...] In this respect, we don't have to choose between either mourning the death of the mythical proletariat as unitary world-subject, or giving up on it and accepting that the only force of transformation in the world is the aggregate of capital's decisions. It's not a question of whether we can act in the face of these crises: people have always acted, and are always acting, in ways that change the world. The real problem is this: how is it possible to act on a global scale in ways that can take advantages of conjunctures like the one we have now? [...] Crisis management in an overly complex and open situation becomes very difficult, and that difficulty is obvious when listening in on the conversations of global elites. Which is where we return to the beginning: it seems that the power of those who control the present has unravelled to such an extent that the future once again appears unwritten, probably in a way that it hasn't been since the 1970s. There really are plenty of similarities: then, too, a phase of capitalist development was drawing to an end (Fordism/Keynesianism then, neoliberalism now); US hegemony was being challenged (by Germany and Japan then, by China and India now), while the country fought a neo-colonial war it couldn't win (Vietnam/Iraq); the dollar was weak, financial systems were in crisis, stagnation and inflation were setting in, oil prices had some nasty shocks in store. More importantly, the present seems to be a point in which various historical series are crossing each other. And they're doing so in ways that could make them diverge in new directions. First and foremost, the series set in motion during the 1970s, where various crises - of public debt, the oil price boom, and a high level of working class organisation - overlapped and brought a 'solution' that involved financialisation, deregulation, the rolling back of social guarantees, and an internalisation of all risk by individuals (i.e. 'globalisation') appears to be coming to and end. The new wave of regulations introduced by the US Federal Reserve, along with the cries that the credit crisis is a result of 'the free market gone too free', would appear to point in this direction. What's more, this seems to be happening at a moment when the decades of effort to put climate change on the agenda appear to have borne fruit; whilst the series of world events opened by 9/11 - and which had a tremendous impact in holding down the cycle of struggles begun in the 1990s' seems to be drawing to a close. [...] Oour interest here has nothing to do with futurology. There are no grand predictions in what follows. No imminent victory, because comfort-zone wishful thinking is the last thing anyone needs now; but no apocalyptic doom either. Neither are there any forward-view mirrors where capitalism recuperates everything and always gets the last laugh. We must have the modesty to recognise that the future is unknown, not because today is the end of everything or the beginning of everything else, but because today is where we are. What we do, what is done to us, and what we do with what is done to us, are what decide the way the dice will fall. This requires the patient and attentive work of identifying openings, directions, tendencies, potentials, possibilities - all of which are things that amount to nothing if not acted upon - and of finding out new ways in which to think about the future. [...] Sci-fi movies, books and comics tend to have two common features. First of all, they all tell us much more about the present than what is to come. That which is fantastically projected into the future reflects what appears to be just beyond our current scientific limits. The Matrixtrilogy - where hacker Neo finds himself up against a simulated reality, governed over by intelligent machines which feed on the energy of humanity - could only have been created in the 1990s, in the context of the rise of both Virtual Reality and internet technology. Second, it is precisely this first feature which allows sci-fi to demonstrate how our 'situated-ness' - our present lived realities and immediate histories ' determines the kinds of utopias and dystopias we are able to imagine. But maybe there is an exception: The role monsters, like Frankenstein's, often play in sci-fi is generally less determined by the present than, for instance, the technologies used to create or destroy them. They imply a potential for, or at least fascination with the idea of, transformation. They defy easy categorisation: they're often part-human, and tend to be embroiled in a process of becoming less so. They are the aspect of science fiction which can help open our imaginations to possibilities of becoming, rather than limit them to what seems possible from within the matrix of the present. They are an antidote to the idea of humanity as a 'species-being' whose essence is static; and a nod towards the idea of flight-lines out of this world. [...] What we take to be the present is made up of the apparent repetition of ordinary, regular points. In fact we become so accustomed to these regularities that we lose sight of the subtle differences that occur in their actual repetition. Octavia Raitt's Today drawings, done at the rate of one a day for 143 days, are a beautiful portrayal of the difference that occurs in the repetition of ordinary points. She shows that finding the singular in the ordinary is a matter of selection. But every singular point means a break from what is ordinary, an opening up of possibility. In order to stop the future being erased by the present, we need to exploit this potential for singular points to change the rules of the game.
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