Futures and Fictions Read online

  This status depends on a certain degree of visibility. When real shell companies are successful, they blend into a background of expected behaviours, appearances and events, and the illicit activity they cover remains invisible. The significance of the Headless project is in its ability to stage an act of mimicry, for if it were effectively mimetic we would not know the names of Goldin+Senneby in the first place, nor recognise the project as a work of art. This performative dimension of the project is arguably what allows us the space to reflect on its critical function in respect to the structures it mimics, a critical function that rebounds back into the art world itself, which is no stranger to strategies that euphemistically fall under the category of “wealth management”. Headless creates a discourse on mimicry, rather than mimicry itself. To translate this into the terms of our argument, the deceptive surface of the project is threatened, and ultimately rendered fictional, by the project itself. It’s not so much that the shell reveals a deeper truth within. Rather, the shell highlights its very status as a shell, it scuppers its claims to being a truthful discourse not through revealing the truth, but making a spectacle of its artificiality. To paraphrase Michael Taussig, what is at stake is a deft display of deception’s deception, skilled revelation of skilled concealment (2008: 108).

  Battle Buses and Post-Truth Politics

  The Headless project is one of a number of recent artworks that experiment with truth, fiction and superficiality, which have in turn given rise to a growing theoretical discussion about the stakes involved in such practices. This discussion gains the most traction when it is grounded in a consideration of wider socio-political conditions. Taking this approach allows us to see that artists who use ‘fiction as a method’ do not simply tread the same path as their Eighties and Nineties predecessors — a long list of artists that includes such names as Jeff Koons, Thomas Demand, Sherrie Levine, Jeff Wall and Gretchen Bender.2 Their work is not a recapitulation of the “the new depthlessness”, a term that Timotheus Vermeulen associates with such practices. It is a repetition with a difference.

  The perennial interest in all things superficial occurs against a backdrop of what has come to be known as “post-truth politics”. In itself, post-truth politics is nothing new. It is what gave a sense of urgency to earlier artistic and theoretical explorations of fiction and deception, particular those of Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Over twenty years later the work of these authors is not referenced half as much as it once was, and yet the urgency that animated it has been renewed rather than diminished.

  To illustrate this point let us sketch a brief historical trajectory. In 1991 Baudrillard published a series of essays collectively titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which he argues that the media (mis)representation of the first Gulf War was subject to levels of distortion never before seen, ultimately saturating the public perception of the war with simulacra. Just over ten years later, Karl Rove, a senior advisor to the Bush administration, was quoted by Ron Suskind as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”. Rove is reported to have steered policy based on a distinction between a “reality based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from […] judicious study of discernible reality”, and another community of “history actors” who create reality.3 Fast-forward to the next decade and such strategies seem commonplace, no longer restricted to the propaganda wars that inevitably accompany international conflicts. In a British context, Rove’s sentiments were echoed by one of the main funders of the 2016 campaign for the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, Arron Banks, who was quoted by Katherine Viner as saying that the campaign team realised early on that “Facts don’t work”.

  In the context of the European referendum debate, in 2016 this approach was writ large, quite literally, on the side of a campaign battle bus that bore the words “We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”. Less than two hours after the result of the referendum, one of the Leave campaign’s key figures, Nigel Farage, conceded that this money would not be available for the NHS after all, and the figure of £350 million has been disputed since it first appeared. The bus itself was tracked down to a garage in south London, prompting the environmental rights group Greenpeace to acquire the vehicle as part of a campaign that saw it parked outside of parliament with the words “TIME FOR TRUTH” emblazoned on its side.

  But is it really time for Truth? In this context, can speaking Truth to power have any more effect than firing a spud gun at a tank? The 1990s preoccupation with simulacra was characterised by a melancholy realisation that even if the Truth were accessible in an unmediated fashion, it would be relatively ineffective against the kind of sophisticated media campaigns governments and large corporations are able to mount. Such campaigns very rarely rely on the persuasive power of facts, more often than not they rely on “truthiness”, to borrow a term from the comedian Steven Colbert — truth measured not through empirical accuracy but through emotion, or in other words, “gut truth”. On a more general level, it is important to realise that exposing a lie does not necessarily diminish its affective power, or bring about a return to a former situation in which the lie ceased to exist. A lie cannot be subtracted from an utterance as if in an equation, leaving us with a discrete, unaffected Truth. The transformations at stake are always additive and irreversible.

  Nevertheless, to reveal an act of deception is not the same as revealing the Truth that it conceals. It is the difference between peeling back the mask of discourse, and simply pointing to the fact that a mask is in use, without claiming that it necessarily conceals an underlying Truth. The latter process does not attempt to subtract the deception; rather it adds another layer to the existing discourse, and directs attention towards a dark — and empty — centre in which the Truth is presumed to reside.

  Such strategies may hold true for deception, but what about fiction? Headless, again, points towards a possible answer. The project is additive in the sense that it applies a surface, or series of surfaces, onto the world of offshore finance. In contrast to the Horniman walrus or the liar’s blush, in which the interior “unmasks” a deceptive exterior, thereby transforming the object as a whole into a fiction, in the Headless project a different kind of fiction seems to be at play: one no longer opposed to falsehood, but instead harnessed as a method to bring about effects that are both critical and creative. This dual aspect is achieved by means of an imposure rather than exposure, which is always an attempt to subtract. Such fictions are multi-layered, applied to the world like a translucent lacquer. They no longer hinge on a straightforward opposition between interior Truth and exterior fiction. In fact, they may not conceal an interior at all. They allow us to see that the surface itself has depth, and that it is only through fiction, understood as an additive process of layering, that we can understand and shape deception’s deception.

  1. Thayer’s paper cutouts had the intended purpose of training an observer in how to successfully see camouflaged animals. In this cutout silhouette of a duck (Figure. 1), Thayer imagines what the bird would look like if it were perfectly camouflaged against the edge of a streambed. According to Thayer, only with the aid of the cutout would the duck be visible in this situation. The device acts as a method for constructing the perfect camouflage, and locating an animal that supposedly possesses it.

  2. The phrase “Fiction as Method” was the title of a conference that took place at Goldsmiths, University of London in October 2015, organised by myself and Jon K. Shaw, as well as a forthcoming publication of the same name.

  3. The quote was only attributed to Karl Rove later, in Mark Danner (2007: 17).

  Works Cited

  Baudrillard, Jean (1994), Simulation and Simulacra. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  ——— (1995), The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  Caillois, Roger (1984), “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”, in October, 31: 16-32.

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sp; D’Israeli, Isaac (1973), Curiosities of Literature, vol. 2. London: Murray.

  Danner, Mark (2007), “Words in a Time of War: On Rhetoric, Truth and Power”, in András Szántó (ed.), What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics. Public Affairs, 16-36. Deleuze, Gilles (1983), “Plato and the Simulacra”, in October, 27: 45-56.

  Guattari, Félix (2013), Schizoanalytic Cartographies. London: Bloomsbury.

  Jameson, Fredric (1992), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

  K.D. (2013), Headless. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Pliny the Elder (1991), Natural History: A Selection. London: Penguin.

  Reeves-Evison, Theo and Jon K. Shaw (eds.) (2017), Fiction as Method. Berlin: Sternberg.

  Rose Shell, Hannah (2012), Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance. New York: Zone.

  Scheibe, Karl (1980), “In Defense of Lying: On the Moral Neutrality of Misrepresentation”, in Berkshire Review, 15: 15-24.

  Suskind, Ron (2004), “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”, in New York Times Magazine, 17 October: n. pag. Web; accessed 1 August 2016.

  Taussig, Michael (2008), “Zoology, Magic, and Surrealism in the War on Terror”, in Crticial Inquiry, 24: 98-116.

  Vermeulen, Timotheus (2015), “The New ‘Depthiness’”, in E-flux, 61.1: n. pag. Web; accessed 1 August 2016.

  Viner, Katherine (2016), “How Technology Disrupted the Truth”, in The Guardian, 12 July: n. pag. Web; accessed 1 August 2016.

  Virilio, Paul (2000), The Information Bomb. London: Verso.

  FROM FINANCIAL FICTIONS TO MYTHOTECHNESIS

  Simon O’Sullivan

  The following article attempts a brief analysis of the strange temporality of “new” financial instruments that allow a kind of engineering of the future from the present and, indeed, the feedback of that future to that present. In particular I am interested in whether this new logic, that has itself come about through increased computational power, involves something different to more typical accounts of science fiction (SF) and what some of the implications of this might be for art practice, especially in its own turn to the digital. As such, the second half of my article attends to two case studies of what I want to call “mythotechnesis” when this names those digital audio-visual practices that are involved in a speculative “future-fictioning” of the real.

  Financial Fictions

  In a short essay on what he calls “Hyperbolic Futures”, Steven Shaviro follows Fredric Jameson (who he quotes) in suggesting that SF offers a “psycho-social-technological cartography” of the present via the setting up of a different perspective (Shaviro’s essay concerns two SF novels: Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes) (Shaviro 2011: 4). For Shaviro, this is SF’s raison d’etre: it can offer a purchase on the various “hyperobjects” that determine our lives in the present but that are too vast to “see”. We might say that this is an isotope of a larger and more general problem of how to represent the abstractions of capitalism. Through cognitive — and affective — mapping then, SF allows us to grasp the increasing complexity of our own contemporary moment.

  However, Shaviro is also attuned to a more speculative function of SF and especially the way in which it can offer up different accounts of the future to those increasingly being engineered by our economic and marketing managers. SF’s capacity to surprise — to offer up a different future — is, for Shaviro, crucial to its identity as a genre. That said, the importance of these different futures is still understood in terms of the present insofar as said importance comes down to the way in which they demonstrate — in their very portrayal of difference — that the present, more typical, ideas of the future have, indeed, been managed. SF can “outline the bars of our prison” as Shaviro puts it (2011: 11). We might briefly gesture back to Jameson here and note a central paradox of SF writing that is connected to this present-future perspective (and that the title of his own book on SF — Archaeologies of the Future — gestures towards): is it, in fact, possible to write about the actual future utilising the means and materials of the present? For Jameson, this is not so much an epistemological or, indeed, a technical issue but an ontological one of how to combine “the not-yet-being of the future” with the being of the present (Jameson 2005: xvi).

  To return to Shaviro, it does seem to me that this understanding of SF as an optic on the present (or, indeed, as a genre confined to a kind of present-future perspective) has its limitations insofar as it can restrict the genre, not least as formal experimentation is invariably less foregrounded (insofar as it is the image or vision of the future that is crucial). Indeed, in many ways the cut-up SF novels of William Burroughs are an answer — at least of sorts — to Jameson’s paradox insofar as they actually produce a different space-time through the break with typical syntax and, indeed, logical sequencing. Shaviro does however also point to another compelling understanding of SF in terms of “financial fictions” — or, more specifically, derivatives — and how these work to actually produce the reality they predict. Here fiction (or, more specifically, the fictioning of future scenarios) operates as a kind of temporal feedback loop (from these futures back to the present). In fact, as we shall see in more detail below, the future is the very condition of possibility for the writing of derivatives and, as such, also begins to have a very real traction on our present reality.1 Following Shaviro, we can certainly identify SF narratives about these financial instruments (Market Forces for example), but what about the idea of SF writing as itself a form of derivative — or loop from the future back to the present?

  It is here that we might briefly turn to a more recent essay by Jameson — “An Art of Singularity” — that also concerns itself with the temporal logic of these financial instruments (which are themselves part of what Jameson sees as a fundamental economic phase shift to globalisation), and, following this, identifies a similar logic that is also evident in recent literature (understood, by Jameson, as a symptom of the broader economic shift). For Jameson this new kind of fiction involves works in which the form — and especially “one-time unrepeatable formal events” — has itself become content (Jameson mentions Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder which he suggests involves, in its narrative structure, precisely the “one-time invention of a device” [2016: 13]). For Jameson there is also a strange kind of flat temporality at play with these events: a “pure present without a past or a future” (2016: 13). In relation to art practice more broadly this is also evident in those works (paradigmatically installation) in which the singular event — “made for the now” — has replaced the object or, indeed, any sense of sequencing (in terms of both historicity and futurity — as, for example, was still in play within modernism and the avant-garde) (2016: 13).

  Turning to financialisation itself, in his article Jameson follows Giovanni Arrighi’s periodisation of Capital, identifying a third stage (our own) in which any new regions of expansion have been exhausted, resulting in a situation where Capital must feed back on itself — double its existing territories — via speculation on futures. A derivative does just this, operating as a highly specific “locus of incommensurables” (Jameson 2016: 118); a temporal mapping of various risks to do with various projected events and ventures (in fact, this is why there can be no generalised theory of the derivative, as Jameson points out, each occasion being unique, hence the reference to singularity in his essay’s title).

  As Jameson also points out, this interest in the future is not in itself new (there has long been a predictive, futures market), but what is new is both the way in which these futures feedback — or have a “reflexion” (2016: 117) — in and on the real, but also that they are now incredibly complex; the various variables are only able to be calculated by computer, which means they are also already properly posthuman (as Jameson remarks, he follows N. Katherine Hayles on this compelling insight). For Jameson the crucial issue is to reclaim a different idea o
f the future from this new temporality that is composed of “a series of singularity-events” operating in and as a “perpetual present” (2016: 122).

  We can deepen this account of derivatives (especially in relation to their temporal structure) by looking to Suhail Malik’s recent article “The Ontology of Finance”. Malik offers a further — but very different — inflection on Jameson’s temporal paradox (of how to write the future from the present) insofar as time, following Malik’s reading of the sociologist Elena Esposito, is figured in terms of systems theory, and, as such, is not to be understood as the backdrop to the operation of derivatives but, rather, in some senses as produced by them (time is system-specific in this sense). Indeed, with derivatives the usual sequencing is scrambled: the future does not come after a present (that itself has come after a past), but is increasingly the very condition of the present (as Malik suggests, the future is the condition of the writing of a derivative). The solution to the paradox of SF is then that time is not separate from the fictions that are its circuits and loops and, indeed, that the future — at least of a kind — is already operational in the present. When laid out flat, as it were, different pasts, presents and futures are all involved in different reflexive and recursive operations.