Futures and Fictions Read online

  FUTURES AND

  FICTIONS

  FUTURES AND

  FICTIONS

  Edited by

  HENRIETTE GUNKEL,

  AYESHA HAMEED

  AND SIMON O’SULLIVAN

  To Mark Fisher

  CONTENTS

  1. Futures and Fictions

  A Conversation between Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan

  2. Revisiting Genesis >>>

  Oreet Ashery

  3. History Will Break Your Heart

  A Conversation between Elvira Dyangani Ose and Kemang Wa Lehulere

  4. Stages, Plots and Traumas

  Robin Mackay

  5. Afrofuturism, Fiction and Technology

  A Conversation between Julian Henriques and Harold Offeh

  6. How Much the Heart Can Hold

  Annett Busch

  7. Luxury Communism

  A Conversation between Mark Fisher and Judy Thorne

  8. Extraterrestrial Relativism

  Stefan Helmreich

  9. Scavenging the Future of the Archive

  A Conversation between Henriette Gunkel and Daniel Kojo Schrade

  10. Automate Sex: Xenofeminism, Hyperstition and Alienation

  Luciana Parisi

  11. The Xenofeminist Manifesto

  Laboria Cuboniks

  12. Sonic Utopias: The Last Angel of History

  A Conversation between Ayesha Hameed, Kodwo Eshun and Louis Moreno

  13. Flicker-Time and Fabulation: From Flickering Images to Crazy Wipes

  Bridget Crone

  14. Surface Fictions

  Theo Reeves-Evisson

  15. From Financial Fictions to Mythotechnesis

  Simon O’Sullivan

  16. A Century of Zombie Sound

  AUDINT

  17. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Notes on Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  FUTURES AND FICTIONS

  A Conversation between Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan

  Simon O’Sullivan: Perhaps we should begin our conversation by discussing what the particular conjunction of our book’s title — futures and fictions — signifies for us? On the one hand our book contains essays on fiction and the future, but it’s really the combination of these two terms that, I think, we originally found compelling. Obviously, this relates directly to the genre of science fiction that more often than not involves a depiction of a possible (utopian or dystopian) future, but I’m certainly interested in how these future fictions have a more general traction on the real, not least insofar as they can offer concrete models for other ways of life in the present (or, indeed, might themselves be materially embodied); could we even call this a kind of science fictioning of the real? I think this was one of the things we were especially concerned with during our initial discussions that led to the Visual Cultures Public Programme at Goldsmiths which was the basis for this book: how fiction might be an important category beyond the literary or filmic — especially in terms of the possibility of a different “political imaginary” beyond the impasses of neoliberalism.

  Henriette Gunkel: Yes, we were interested in future fictions beyond the ones available in this current political moment, beyond what neoliberalism holds for us — so beyond fiction’s impact on the real as already operating in the current systems of financialisation and geopolitical relations as recently highlighted, for example, in Adam Curtis’ not unproblematic new film HyperNormalisation (2016). The fictioning aspect of the financial system has been foregrounded prior to the film, of course — for example by Mark Fisher in his concept of “SF capital”, which emphasises the crossover from science fiction and the apparent future-orientated and speculative nature of capital itself.

  While keeping these conceptualisations of future fictions in mind, we were interested in collectively assembled projects that work against neoliberalism’s push for competitive individualism and right-wing politics that we can currently see on the rise in Europe as well as in the US. We were also interested in a political imaginary which needs to be read relational to historically situated struggles that give us insights into alternative times and spaces. This is where our shared interest in Afrofuturism as deeply rooted in black radical thought comes in, I would say, which was one of the aspects of future fictions that we foregrounded and which points to an engagement with the future that ceases to devalue the present and the past. As such, Afrofuturism operates differently than a number of Futurisms in the past and brings to the fore how the future is already implicated in the different dimensions of time.

  Art and visual culture have the capacity to draw our attention to these non-linear conceptions of time and inspire our theorisation of futurity as alternative space-times by collapsing the supposedly distinct categories of past/present/future. I am particularly drawn to art strategies that propose different forms of being in the world by cutting familiar lines of association and reassembling new worlds, as visible, for example, in practices of sampling, collage, montage, or the cut-up. We can find this world-making potential of art at the conjuncture between futures and fictions also in Daniel Kojo Schrade’s conscious layering of paint in his abstract paintings which produces not only a palimpsest of time but also creates spaces in-between for new subjectivities to emerge. Annett Busch’s writing about or with John Akomfrah’s films similarly functions as a form of montage — an assemblage of quotes, voice overs and philosophical ideas — which is organised around a key argument Akomfrah made in a recent talk: that the future begins by making an image.

  Ayesha Hameed: One of our interests in the conjunction between futures and fictions lies in trying to think through how temporality is spatially embedded, manifest in sedimentations, intensities and condensations. Such condensations have the potential to form a kind of object that operates as what Gilles Deleuze would call a radioactive fossil, and what Walter Benjamin would conceive of as a dialectical image: objects that through their own charge and materiality make transversal cuts through time and destabilise the chronotopes to which they belong. Such objects can act as portals to collapse two temporal moments together.

  This book explores how we collect such objects, act as their soothsayers and produce forms of creative misunderstandings. In his conversation with Harold Offeh, Julian Henriques refers to a diagram of sound systems, which highlights the visual and spatial quality of the production of sound — a compilation that also exceeds its components in its affective charge. This kind of prescience runs through John Akomfrah’s film Last Angel of History on several registers, including sound and its use of props and colour, as Louis Moreno, Kodwo Eshun and I discuss in our conversation. Stefan Helmreich’s exploration of the anthropology of the ocean calls attention to a speculative turn intrinsic to scientific studies — a phenomenon he refers to in his contribution to this volume. Something exceeds empirical study and is coded as alien and speculative, and possibly from outer space.

  Another theme we consider is how fictioning operates from both above (from the state) and below (at a grassroots level). Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1969) makes references to this in its articulation of tigers’-leaps into the past and future and warnings about the co-optations of history. In other words, that hallucinations and forms of fictions are being constantly produced from above. The danger today seems to lie in how there’s no jolt out of the dream state of state-produced fictions. A constant state of befuddlement is now familiar and the dream state continues. And yet from below we’d like to think there is still the possibility for fictioning to undo the “dream-work of imperialism”, as W.J.T. Mitchell puts it. So fictioning as a tool and a weapon th
at infiltrates and actively pursues alternatives by posing some “what ifs”. From this perspective, futures plural can become a tactic that in each instance takes on the guise that the situation requires — not utopic or dystopic; nor as a means to deconstruct the present; nor a repurposing of the past. Rather it is all of these things simultaneously and none of them either.

  SOS: Yes, I think for all of us there is an interest — and investment — in the politics of fiction, whether that be how fiction is deployed by the state (what William Burroughs once called “control”) or how it might be used as a more resistant practice, not least in articulating and imaging other — different — futures (as you suggest, Ayesha, the plural seems crucial). There’s something here about how fiction can impact on the real, in fact change it, at least to some extent. This is also at stake — to pull in another important pre-cursor — in the Cybernetic culture research unit’s concept of “hyperstition”, which names elements of fiction that make themselves real via temporal feedback loops. Hyperstition involves a different, more cybernetic, account of time — almost as if it has been flattened — with different temporal circuits and recursive nestings at work. I think this has some connections with Sun Ra’s myth-science that also involves connections between the future and past, but also, as you suggest Henri, with “SF Capital” and the strange temporality of financial instruments such as derivatives in which an idea of the future becomes operative in the present. We increasingly seem to exist in a kind of “patchwork temporality” in this sense.

  In relation to this — and some of your remarks Henri — it’s also worth foregrounding that as well as the future it’s also the past (and, again, different pasts) that interest us, and how these might have a “residual” potential in the present. I’m sure that we’ll come onto our own contemporary political scene in a moment, but it’s worth saying here that for me it’s crucial to disentangle this interest in the past and future from what has become known as “neoreaction” and its own account of a patchwork temporality. I’d also say, as a bit of a tangent, that it’s in fiction per se that we tend to see experiments with the knotting together of different past-presents-futures. One of my favourite novels is emblematic in this sense: Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, which involves a nesting of fictions but also all sorts of complex temporal loops to the past and future.

  So, art practices can certainly represent these other future-fictions, but, more radically, as you allude to Ayesha, it can involve the presentation — or instantiation perhaps — of them in the here and now. I think you’re right to mention the cut-up Henri, as, for me, Burroughs’ writings precisely explore this deployment of other times in the present. Indeed, if typical time is sequential, linear, then the cut-up disrupts this, and, in so doing, invents other space-times. I think this has a bearing on other formal experiments in SF writing, for example with J.G. Ballard, but also on art practice more generally that can involve this play with language and syntax, and, indeed, with a certain grammar and semantics of objects and images.

  As a bit of an aside, the idea of fictioning has resonances, I think, with the practice of magick (the “k” here marks a difference with magic more typically understood as a form of non-scientific causality) that also involves a certain manipulation of the real, or, at least, the exploration of other realities outside the consensual. Magick also names a more wilful self-determination, the idea of “becoming a cause of oneself”. Indeed, when it comes to fictioning I think figures like Austin Osman Spare and his various techniques of self-transformation (for example through sygyll magick) have much to teach us (the artist David Burrows has written well on this, see Burrows 2016). This relates to our interest in past modes of existence, but also to the way our book looks to other, non-Western cultures. As far as all this goes, it’s especially more syncretic practices — of creolisation and the like — that would seem to offer the possibility of a really different future to that predicted by our futures managers.

  HG: I would like to take up your reference to other realities outside the consensual, Simon, and link it to our overall interest in different and multiple futures that we have articulated so far in this conversation — which, in one way or another, seem to be linked to the notion of hope and seem to imply that there is at least some form of future available for all of us (and I am not talking about human beings exclusively here).

  In his conversation with Elvira Dyangani Ose, Kemang Wa Lehulere points to other realities that seem to complicate our understanding of the chronopolitical when he talks about the archaeological dig that he performed in a backyard in Gugulethu at the outskirts of Cape Town — an archaeological dig that we find articulated in The Last Angel of History and a number of SF narratives and practices that connect the future project to the past. In Kemang’s case this dig became more than a symbolic gesture the moment he excavated bones, human remains. This discovery speaks to the afterlives of the apartheid regime but also seems to foreground the fact that for certain groups of people the future was/is already foreclosed — which reflects back on Audre Lorde’s prominent line “we were never meant to survive” in her poem “A Litany of Survival” (1995). And here we can all think of numerous other historical and contemporary examples that demonstrate how relevant Lorde’s poem is today: Europe’s politics towards migrants and refugees — a politics that consciously and repeatedly turns the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard for black and brown bodies — is one of many current examples. Another is the killings of African-Americans by white police, addressed, for example, in the Black Lives Matter movement which not only points to the fact that at this moment in the US black lives do not matter but also mobilises black people, specifically the youth, and their allies to resist state-sanctioned violence (which will be even more pressing now that Trump is elected president).

  For me these are important strategies and experiences to consider in our discussion of future fictions. We can find another conceptualisation of “no future” articulated in the punk/post-punk context/moment but also, more recently, and definitely influenced by it, in Lee Edelman’s positioning of queer temporality understood as an anti-relational, anti-social politics of “no future” that breaks with teleological conceptions of hope and reproduction in the context of straight time (2004). Against the backdrop of Kemang’s work, however, the implications of “no future”, as proposed by Edelman, stand in an uncanny tension to the violence that constitutes and defines blackness — and a number of queer scholars have challenged Edelman by foregrounding the relationship between queer temporality and Afrofuturism and explicitly returning to the concept of hope (as for example the important work of José Esteban Muñoz) which in my opinion remains a crucial feeling in the context of the political. But it is these different articulations of the chronopolitical that emerge out of the experiences and realities outside the consensual (a consensual that you can also find in left academic writing, at least in the Anglo-American context) that allow us to ask more specifically how certain approaches to time function as pressure points to more conventional understandings/theorisations of the concept of future, but also of fictioning.

  AH: I think it is crucial Henri that you bring Black Lives Matter and the recurring deaths of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea into this conversation, as of course the political project of the conjoining of futures and fictions stems precisely from long histories and ongoing occurrences of racialised and neo-colonial forms of violence. Sun Ra’s project can only make sense in the wake of racialised slavery in America and the genocide during the middle passage. It is not a whimsical flight of fancy but rather a structured protest whose flight is inextricable from the violence that it is responding to.

  There is an affective charge in naming these moments as those with “no future” that I think is crucial to this configuration. When something is named in a manner that has the affective charge of hitting a nail on the head, a lateral sense of possibilities is produced in that moment that produces a line of flight. Lorde’s “Litany of Survival�
�� is testament to the kind of curtailment and opening up to possibility that occur in the same instant and cannot be extricated from one another.

  Ambivalence is key here as it produces a set of lateral tactics. So, when Simon brings up the cut-up I think these ambivalent concerns are what are at stake. There is a failure on the part of linear time and empirical testimony to adequately address the chronic political and social crises from the long twentieth century on. So even though the cut-up might be seen as an aesthetic gesture now, the possibilities that arise from this gesture do so in part from the violence of the act itself towards a text or a film or whatever media that has been wrung dry of meaning and cannot address the inchoate needs of a present moment. Thus the text is cut up like a corpse on an autopsy table with the same kind of sacrilegious intent. Thus the violence of the cut and the not knowing or understanding what that gesture produces it is constantly generative. The incision into the text or film is akin to the hitting-the-nail-on-the-head feeling produced by naming a moment of no future. There is a despair in the gesture that affectively produces something in another realm. And this is what we attempt to present in our book: transversal cuts between several different forms and objects — imagistic, linguistic, architectural, filmic, that act as the soothsayers that I mentioned above.

  This crisis has metastasised though, and as Henri rightly points out our current moment is even more pressing with the recent US elections and the spectre of all kinds of futures likely being curtailed — the erection of the US-Mexico border wall, the irreversible destruction of the environment — the impact is beyond the imaginary of the current moment. The kind of nail-on-the-head affective charge of naming something accurately or the kind of political and libidinal release effected by the cut-up is in danger of being blunted and that we are at a political and epistemic threshold that calls for a similar mutation of these tools.

  SOS: Yes, the cut-up is a powerful tool for challenging consensual reality and, especially I think, dominant regimes of subjectivity. The cut-up, or, indeed, other forms of experimentation with images and narrative, does not pander to what Jean-François Lyotard once called the “fantasies of realism” (1984: 74) and the desire for a subjectivity already in place to be reassuringly “mirrored back” by typical narrative structure and image sequences (it’s interesting in this respect that Lyotard, along with Deleuze, was at the infamous Schizo-Culture conference where Burroughs delivered his lecture on “The Limits of Control”). For myself this connects to the political importance of art practice that can involve interrogations on what we might call this more subjective level.