Futures and Fictions Read online

  In relation to this and what you’ve just said about the libidinal, Ayesha, I also think some of the material in our book problematises what might be called the new Prometheanism apparent in some areas of the critical humanities (as in “accelerationism”). I would say our investment in futures and fictions, although partaking of the conceptual and rational (especially in its experimental form) also pulls in the libidinal and, of course, the fictional. Actually, I think both Luciana Parisi’s introduction to Laboria Cuboniks’ xenofeminist manifesto, and the manifesto itself, also attend to this area — and, in terms of the imbrication of the fictional and the technological, there is also AUDINT’s future fabulation included in our volume. In fact, with the event of new technologies and especially cheaper and more readily available digital imaging and sampling technology, I think we are at the beginning of some very exciting developments in presenting hybrid times and spaces (I address this — at least a little — in my own essay in our book).

  We’ve talked quite a lot about the concept of futures (again, the plural seems important), but just to turn to fictions for a moment, our book also gathers some interesting “uses” of fiction within contemporary art (when this is broadly construed). I’m thinking of Theo Reeves-Evison’s contribution, and especially the part in his essay on Goldin+Sennesby and their play with the surfaces and fictions of financialisation; a kind of generative parasitical practice. Bridget Crone also has recourse to different fictions in her account of the “flicker-image” at work in Tony Conrad’s films. Then there’s also Oreet Ashery and her use of fiction as method in her own expanded art practice — and how this connects also to her interest in performance. Finally, more generally (and more philosophically), there’s also Robin Mackay’s account of “yarn work” as a form of fiction or plotting that transits between local and global contexts (and that also relates to therapeutic work).

  Staying with fiction, another area not explicitly included in our volume is the work of feminist scholars on science/speculative fiction and “worlding” (an exception to this — at least to a certain extent — being the short story by Ursula K. Le Guin which ends our collection; I know we were all very excited to be able to republish this particular fiction as it both speaks to our thematics but also changes the register of our edited collection). I’m thinking especially of writers like Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers (both of whom look to Le Guin’s SF writing as a kind of conceptual resource) and their accounts of the co-creation of different worlds and, indeed, how different art practices are involved in this (see Haraway 2016; Stengers 2013). This has implications also for a more ecological consciousness — fictions of the universe in which the human is not the centre. For myself it is especially interesting how “world” is used as a verb by Haraway, as in “to world”. My sense is that fiction might also be used in this way (“to fiction”) and that this might signal the move from literary examples to something more performative. I think this is where I would situate the move from fiction to fictioning.

  HG: I appreciate your focus on the notion of co-creation which you emphasise in relation to the call for being worldly, and that also surfaces in your own scholarship on fictioning (2014) — which you conceptualise as the possible production of different space-times in relation to a collectivity that you seem to understand foremost as a scene (rather than an x amount of people implied) through which one can perform one’s own alienation. I always think of Octavia Butler’s multispecies storytelling when I read Haraway — in particular her book Fledgling which presents this beautifully queer multispecies becoming; or her Xenogenesis trilogy. Interestingly, Parable of the Talents has been given some attention in the post-Trump election as it seems to have written someone very much like Trump into being nearly twenty years ago, a presidential candidate figure that mobilises his constituency with the very slogan “Make America Great Again”.

  In her multi-form worlding practice, Haraway also reminds us of the need for denormalisation by arguing that “it matters to destabilise worlds of thinking with other worlds of thinking”, or “which ideas we think other ideas with”. We can find this form of speculative thinking also articulated in the conversation between Mark Fisher and Judy Thorne — even though not necessarily foregrounded as a multispecies one. In their proposed communist hyperstitional practice they bring together two strikingly disparate concepts, communism and luxury. Not as an attempt to revive each concept through the other but as a form of reassemblage — here the cut-up operates through ideas and concepts that are reassembled and as such become unrecognisable and produce this productive ambivalence that you were pointing towards earlier, Ayesha, that possibly leads to a new platform for dreaming as you call it, Simon, in relation to the potentiality of fictioning. The difference to what is already available to us — and as such experienced and felt, in one way or another — is foregrounded by the unlikely alliance between the two terms, but through their combination they create a form of unpredictability that possibly arrives at a collective potentiality.

  To me this sense of collectivity implied in the idea of communism then operates not as an assumed uncritical commonality but, rather, emerges from a shared sense of dissatisfaction with the current political moment which is precisely “not the unproblematic being in common but the mysterious being with” which informs much current writing around the commons in recent years (in this case the notion of the brown commons by Muñoz). It provides a refocus on different forms of being in this world together that is expressed in notions of the commons, in communist hyperstitional practices, in practices of worlding and co-created forms of fabulation.

  AH: Haraway’s interest in the multispecies implications of worlding also leads to her exploration of the cthulucene as a tactical response to the flash of warning signalled by the anthropocene. This is another register where the war cry of “no future” rings out urgently as well, in the literally seismic shifts that are leading the planet unstoppingly to ecological catastrophe and irreversible breaking points in global warming. Her intervention narrows the anthropocene’s indictment of all of humanity to focus on the impact of capitalism and the development of plantations. She also scales down her analysis to the erosions and counter erosions effected at the level of organisms fuelled by feminist commitment to what she calls “staying with the trouble”. What’s interesting in the context of this discussion is that this form of cohabitation creates fictions where the human is not at the centre anymore. How does one consider this cry of “no future” — its planetary and geological time and space scales — in relation to Black Lives Matter and Edelman’s anti-reproductive futurism that Henri flagged earlier? How does the non-human set of actors factor into a response to the end of futures?

  If the trouble of this time is the erosion of facticity in a post-Trump era that has left reality as a basis behind, then the tools need to be made of another material. Perhaps one route is to consider the agency of the soothsaying objects and spatialities that I brought up earlier in constructing alternate worlds. To consider their soothsaying as not needing to be revelatory of facts behind the fictions, but rather producing another conjunction of futures and fictions that took into account new tactics of “troubles” and “scaling”. This would add to a growing taxonomy of futures plural, another method that scales down the unimaginable into a series of frictions and incommensurables and then stays with those troubles. What would a multispecies, planetary, troubled reworking of futures and fictions look like?

  Image credit: Sam Nightingale (2016) Spectral Ecologies, black and white photographs.

  Image credit: Sam Nightingale (2016) Spectral Ecologies, black and white photographs.

  Works Cited

  Benjamin, Walter (1969), “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 245-55.

  Burrows, David (2016), “Self Obliteration through Self Love”, in Black Mirror. London: Fulgur, 136-57.

  Butler, Octavi
a (1998), Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories Press.

  — — — (2005), Fledgling. New York: Seven Stories Press.

  Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press.

  Gilroy, Paul (2014), “Hearing our History Now” Lecture. Brilliant Corners, London.

  Haraway, Donna J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

  Lorde, Audre (1995 [1978]), The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: Norton.

  Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

  Mitchell, W.J.T (2002) “Imperial Landscape”, in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 5-34.

  Muñoz, José Esteban (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press.

  O’Sullivan, Simon (2014), “Art Practice as Fictioning (or, myth-science)”, in diakron, no. 1. http://bit. ly/200SMgw; accessed 9 December 2016.

  Stengers, Isabelle (2013), “Matters of Cosmopolitics: On the Provocations of Gaïa, Isabelle Stengers in Conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin”, in Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, ed. Etienne Turpin. Michigan: Open Humanities Press.

  REVISITING GENESIS >>>

  Oreet Ashery

  An Intro, a Future, a Fiction

  It is awkward to talk about a piece of work that hasn’t happened yet. Writing this, I am midway through the process of completing the web series Revisiting Genesis. An artist needs time to reflect on their work, and insight is the fruit-child of retrospection > the performance is over, friends say their goodbyes and an hour later you clear up the mess, bent over a brush and dust-pan. First you were high, now you are low, adrenalin vacating > I have been on this emotional roller-coaster many times before, but on this occasion the performance hasn’t even started and it’s already tangential. Telling you about Revisiting Genesis now puts me in transitive time, in time of secession. A wishful training in self-belief. I can’t really write about the unmade work, so instead I will write around, underneath and beside it. I will introduce influences, references, information, quotes and thoughts, not all connected or resolved, but I assure you > never random. I could have approached it differently, but women shouldn’t apologise for something they have not even done yet.

  A claimer > when I speak of women, I mean women identified: identified with women, identified as women, sometimes identifying. In Revisiting Genesis I am not interested in biochemistry, genitals or forms of essentialism; those are only useful in court cases > the dis/empowerment of being minor is rooted in language. Yesterday I bumped into Onkar Kular who said to me: “Oh I’m going to invent a new language. The future needs a new language. We need a new language, we talk in a new language, of course we do.” Kular was referring to Night School on Anarres, a space to learn Pravic — based on the Dispossessed, a 1974 utopian science-fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. One quote from Le Guin, used in the script for Revisiting Genesis, is that women can’t successfully pretend to be men, too much hips. This sentiment could be visualised in many ways but a useful difference between Speculative Fiction and Fantasy is that SF has the immediate ability to de-normalise what already exists and as such offers a political satire of the NOW>

  A Mood

  A mood, an environment, a situation, a heterotopic space. Conceiving of Revisiting Genesis is thinking about a mood, trying to communicate THE MOOD > trying to get THE MOOD in the room > feeling something > a kind of a feeling of something distinct yet vaporous. Sometimes a tablecloth of a certain colour is enough to create a mood. It’s a struggle telling stories, but I have to tell you this one. Today on my way to the bus stop, time and space screeched to a halt in a hectic central London street when this incredibly old woman > the oldest person you can try to imagine, came to me and said: “I’m dying, everything is dying. It’s all TV and internet. Are you dying?” And I can’t stop thinking: Why today, when I’m writing about the death of everything and the internet? What is she trying to teach me? Am I writing my own death? Am I too flippant? The bus stop marked the limitlessness of heterotopia; we were alone, forming a set of conditions for undesirable bodies to come together. This story should have been enough, enough to bring you the mood and the synthesis of Revisiting Genesis. If only I could tell the story.

  Figure 1. © Oreet Ashery (2016) Revisiting Genesis video still. Memory stick by Audrey Samson.

  The Slideshow, Memory as Identity

  Revisiting Genesis follows two nurses, both named Jackie, who assist people actively preparing for death to create biographical slideshows > a This Is Your Life type slideshow. The slideshows are used as a tool and a trigger for reflection on cultural and social loss and memory as identity. The script interlaces three narrative modes, the story of Genesis, the story of Bambi and the stories of real people with real life-limiting conditions. Genesis represents a figure of withdrawal and increased dysfunctionality > she is dying > her friends beg the nurse for a slideshow > a memory trigger > a sensory rigger > an emotional pass > a consolidator of events rearranged. The narrative, if you could call it that, centres around the unfolding presentations of the protagonists’ slideshows. Genesis’ slideshow is made of my archival images and to an extent her partial and fictional biography is mine, although this is not important to know.

  When I spoke to doctors and nurses in palliative care and hospices, as well as volunteers who support people who are dying, they told me of the treatment called Reminiscence Therapy. Dr Natasha Arnold explained how photographs, smells, sounds and objects from patients’ lives are used to trigger their memory and help consolidate their fragmented sense of self, particularly in cases of dementia. A number of nurses who teach and specialise in palliative care told me that patients’ sense of self and identity can disintegrate in the face of terminal illness or old age, and that patients are not the sum of their illness or symptoms, but rather a story to be told. As someone who is interested in the construction and narration of minor identities, fictional and real combined, I was drawn in. I assembled the idea of a slideshow made for those who are approaching death as a narrative holder or a continuous spine that runs through Revisiting Genesis. The slideshows of Genesis, Bambi and the real people with life-limiting conditions — Julia Warr, Annie Brett, Roger Ely and Joel Sines — bring about questions of friendships, care, afterlife presence, emerging death industries and the death of social structures under neoliberalism. Death and dying has no clear beginning or end — “When I died I continued hearing. One can keep hearing for at least a few days after death. I didn’t only hear what the doctor said, I heard him speaking from inside herself.” > An account of a patient with a transpersonal near-death experience > When does a piece of work start and end? Where does gender? Do we ever stop dying?

  People with Life-Limiting Conditions in Revisiting Genesis

  To find people with life-limiting conditions who wanted to participate in the work, we ran audition interviews in August 2015 as part of the exhibition program of Figure 2, at the ICA in London. We spoke about the ways in which life-limiting conditions, chronic and terminal illness create a heterotopic space > a time and space outside that of the everyday that is manifest in nuanced states of mind and creative outlets. Like theories of black holes where time and space interchange, stretch and mutate > at one point the nurse asks Genesis’ friends if Genesis perhaps fell into such a black hole > “Do you have black holes in your area?” > Genesis’ friend replies, “No, luckily we don’t have them in our area”. In the museum, for example, artworks and artists from different times and geographies are encased in one such heterotopic space during one visitor’s journey, sharing many relational existences > one space gives another space a meaning > in Revisiting Genesis, the three intersecting narrative modes of Genesis, Bambi and the interviews with real peop
le give one space a new meaning through the cross-referencing of another space.

  For minorities > all in different ways > for reasons of precarity, familial circumstances and the lack of established acceptance or belonging > the active processes of dying create unique heterotopic spaces. See for example narrative accounts and case studies in the book Death and the Migrant, a sociological account of transnational dying and care in British cities, by Yasmin Gunaratnam.

  Audition interview for Revisiting Genesis tape 1 — Annie Brett

  Friends are very, very important, with a chronic illness such as Crohn’s disease, you spend an awful long time in bed, being very, very unwell, being unable to attend events and things like that, and you end up, you end up letting people down. People invite you to things like parties and you say yes of course, I will be there, I wouldn’t miss it for the world and then you suddenly become ill and you suddenly have these dark thoughts like you are letting them down and you can’t help but think that you are letting them down, and that builds upon itself, but then you see them later and you say I’m really, really sorry that I couldn’t be there for you and they’re like it doesn’t matter, I am your friend, I know you have this illness, I know you flirt with death constantly, going in and out of hospitals, I am always there, and it is those people that get you through the days, it is those people that come to see you if you are in hospital, check up on you, those text messages you get just saying I’m sorry you can’t be there, we will do something again soon.