Futures and Fictions Read online

  Malik’s own thesis is developed on the basis of a key logic of derivatives (defined, by him, and at their most simple, as temporally-based contracts between two parties to sell or buy an asset at a certain future date): that they tend to operate essentially divorced from the underlying asset they concern (or, rather, via the deferral of the underlying; the contracts are rarely cashed in as it were). As such, any individual “pricing” operates through a complex network of differential prices, that begins with the difference between the price paid for the derivative and the predicted price of the asset at a future date, rather than, again, through being tied to any material asset (or, indeed, materially productive process). This is a network that spreads throughout space (and, as such, operates contra state boundaries), but also through time. Indeed, to all extents and purposes the “terrain” of what we might call financial colonisation is infinite — not just because of the progression into an ever more distant future (involving ever further complex mathematics), but also, crucially, because these differential networks become nested as derivatives of derivatives are written (it is this dynamic “hedging” that constitutes the real phase shift to financialisation).

  Malik offers an impressive amount of detail on the various mechanisms at play in these and other financial instruments, but ultimately, following Jacques Derrida, names this new logic (of différance) the “arkhederivative”, pointing out that the latter is not simply the logic of a certain kind of financial instrument (derivatives and the like) but also the very principle of financialisation and the new form of “capital-power” attendant on this (Malik 2014: 775-80). The metaphysics of the market — which might appear to trade on the presence of an underlying asset — is always already under deconstruction in this sense.

  Of particular interest for my purposes is the way in which financialisation operates a particular kind of time management, or, more bluntly, designs predictive technologies. Malik discusses some of these — such as the “Black-Scholes Model” (an especially successful predictive formula) — but also offers up a compelling counter-argument such that the very unpredictability of the market — its volatility — is, in fact, constitutive to the successful working of derivatives that precisely need different horizons of possibility in order to multiply (the nesting function I mentioned earlier). In this sense, financialisation is not really about accurately predicting — or, indeed, controlling — the future, but rather keeping it open, proliferating scenarios. We might note briefly here that this nesting of financial fictions — a kind of trading in representations without referent (or, at any rate, a deferral of any referent) — does not mean there is no traction on the real. Indeed the real (at least, the real in terms of the financial markets) is produced by these fictions (to say nothing of the further impact on social and political reality of financialisation).

  To return to Jameson’s paradox we might say then that the logic of derivatives allows a wholly different take on the future (or, more precisely, on time itself) to more typical SF writing. In this understanding the future is not a place as such, but precisely pure contingency (when “anything might happen”). In a similar take on metaphysics, the contemporary philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has demonstrated (in his seminal work After Finitude) that although it is unknowable in one sense, one can begin to say certain things about the outside to our present experience (it is, in fact, thinkable). For Meillassoux, “access” to what he calls “The Great Outdoors” hinges on its character as a radically contingent “hyper-chaos” (again, it is not a “place” as such), but also the way in which we can ascertain — conceptually as it were — certain characteristics or “properties” of this radical contingency (beginning with the fact that it is only this contingency that is necessary). Likewise with derivatives and other financial instruments: one can begin to set out certain conceptual coordination points that characterise any future (in terms of its contingency), but also that then allow this future to impact on present decisions. As Malik remarks, following Elie Ayache (a key pre-cursor to his own thesis), derivatives (or market pricing) “can be characterised as a technology of the future” in this sense (2014: 761); and the market understood as “the medium of contingency” (Malik quotes Ayache 2014: 761).

  Early on in his article, Malik remarks that what he offers up is a “general theory of price largely dedicated to the identification of capital-power’s complex constitution and organisation”, but also that this might be considered preliminary (and, we might say, theoretical) work, following Left accelerationism, for a “revectoring required to provide the requisite political tasks” (Malik 2014: 639). One can speculate on what such a revectoring might involve, in particular an intervention of some kind in the derivatives market (as, for example, with the Robin Hood project).2 As Malik points out, sabotage per se is ruled out by definition insofar as such interruptions and ruptures are part of the system’s operating volatility; or, to say the same differently, more typical strategies that might work in terms of sabotaging investment, and so forth, are rendered ineffectual in a derivatives market that can itself be premised on counter-production. Might there, however, be other options?

  Towards the end of a compelling interview (“The Writing of the Market”) about his own theorisation (as laid out in his book The Blank Swan) of the financial market — as its own kind of event, or even entity, that operates separate from the world — Elie Ayache writes of the trader in the pit as a kind of Nietzschean übermensch who lives the very particular time — and “intensity” — of the market:

  One can see that because he lives right at the hinge of the event (in the middle of the event) and not in the world that precedes or follows the event, he somehow achieves a “state of rest” relative to the event. He lives at the same (infinite) speeds as the event (2010: 599).

  Might there be a role for “artist as trader” here? Someone fully immersed in the market’s volatility and “playing” its logics? Perhaps, insofar as dynamically interacting with the market actively produces the latter (trading, in this sense, might be thought of as creative and productive). And yet this has its limitations insofar as its radicality, at least as pitched by Ayache, is simply an antidote to the boredom of a more static reality (the “active market maker” loves volatility because he/she loves challenges as it were). And, of course, such a position is still focussed on trading in order to make a profit.

  What then about a position one step removed from the markets, that re-presents them — at a distance — as it were? Certainly, as with the SF novels that Shaviro looks at, there might well be art work that is about the new landscape of financialisation. A recent interesting example is Suzanne’s Treister’s exhibition HFT The Gardener, that explores — in paintings, drawings and a film-fiction — the world of high-frequency trading in relation to the neurochemistry of the traders (and especially the bizarre connection with psychotropic plants).3 A further option here might be a certain kind of “acceleration” of the logics of financialisation. Indeed, what would it mean to further accelerate the function of the derivative? To nest its fictions beyond the reasonable (or the cash-in-able)? This would not necessarily involve an intention to profit from the market (as in Ayache’s own start-up financial company — or, indeed, any number of dealers and galleries that play the art market), but something perhaps more parasitical — or even ironic. Something that mimics the logics and workings of the financial markets (especially in terms of the production of ever more complex financial fictions). An interesting case study of an art practice that is a kind of “re-vectoring” in these terms is Goldin+Sennersby and their Headless novel (ghostwritten by “K.D.”).4

  Another, more oblique kind of revectoring might be to think the logic of the derivative — how it folds time inside its own structure and, indeed, allows the future to condition the present — in relation to other, apparently non-financial practices. To return to the question I posed above, could certain forms of SF, for example, be thought of as operating in a similar manner to derivatives? To
a certain extent the need to be readable (as in typical SF literature) restricts the possibilities (although there is certainly a case to be made that experimental SF — J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Samuel R. Delany spring to mind — can present “cuts” in time) but, in art practice, this nesting function can be taken further. Derivatives of derivatives of derivatives can be pushed beyond the sensible (and commonsensical). These kinds of “performance fictions”, derived but ultimately disconnected from the world as-it-is, are constituted by a nesting function: the repetition of motifs and fragments of motifs, the construction of complex avatars from the what-is but layered so as to become unrecognisable (and, as such, that might point towards a different future). Just as increased processing power allows for the derivative so we might note that these kinds of practices are especially more prevalent with new — and readily available — digital imaging and editing technologies. Indeed, new technology has, it seems to me, made this fictioning function of art more apparent.

  Here SF moves towards what I want to call mythotechnesis: the production of technologically enabled (and experimental) future-fictions that feedback on the real. Ultimately, financial fictions — derivatives — demonstrate a certain logic (of the nested feedback loop) that is premised on a contract between two parties and especially a dynamic hedging of bets (again, it is this that allows the exponential “growth” of the market). Mythotechnesis also operates through feedback loops and as a contract between two parties, here the strange composite figures and avatars that are produced (and that are of a future yet-to-come) are in contract with a present subjectivity that has, despite themselves, produced them — alongside other subjectivities in the here and now that hear their call to a very different kind of future.

  Mythotechnesis (or case studies of practice)

  I want now to present two possible “case studies” of this mythotechnesis that follow from my discussion above, but that also open up some further lines of enquiry in relation to “post-internet” art practices and how they involve a fictioning of reality that is also an instantiation of the future in the present.

  Ryan Trecartin’s CENTER JENNY

  As I suggested above, it seems to me that there might well be art practices that comment on, or intervene in, the new financial landscapes of prediction and contingency (or, indeed those that are “about” these new territories), but more interesting might be those in which a similar temporal structure (to the various instruments of the markets) is in play but instantiated in a different form. An example of this kind of mythotechnesis — a future-fiction that is, as it were, materially incarnated in the here and now — is the practice of Ryan Trecartin. Indeed, in a film like CENTER JENNY the future has already arrived and is operative in the present as a kind of “future shock”.

  In fact, Trecartin’s own description of what is in play in his films — in terms of their structure — could equally be a description of derivatives, especially as Jameson describes them in their singular — yet very complex — character: “as if there are proposed realities that inhabit themselves via structural collaborations and then disperse when they’re no longer needed by the entities involved” (Trecartin and Kunzru 2011). For Trecartin this also means that the characters — or avatars — of his films operate in and as what he calls “an affective possibility space”, in which existence is simply the “temporary state of maintaining a situation” (Trecartin and Kunzru 2011). The avatars are events that gather various temporal loops alongside certain affective vectors (might we even say, in a Deleuzian vein, “becomings”?) giving them a precarious and often minimal consistency. To quote Trecartin:

  Figure 1. © Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin (2013), Priority Innfield (Fence). Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

  The future and the past can be equally malleable; I don’t think they go in opposite directions. Memory is more an act of memorisation than recalling: you’re creating something that doesn’t really exist behind you, it exists in the same place the future exists. In my videos the characters try to treat that idea as fact (Trecartin and Kunzru 2011).

  As Trecartin’s interlocutor (the novelist Hari Kunzru) suggests — in the interview from where the above quotes are taken — there is then an adjusting of the past from the future. Indeed, following Malik, to see time as system-specific — as cybernetic — means any time can impact on any other time. In the patchwork temporality of Trecartin’s films different loops and circuits connect and feedback on one another producing a certain compressed density (and even, at times, a compelling opacity).

  Trecartin’s films are digitally recorded and edited (ultimately they are “written” as code), but, in terms of the material instantiation of fiction and, indeed, the nesting function I outlined above, they also involve “real” actors in “real” locations. They are also often installed in physical gallery spaces alongside sets and other sculptural elements produced in collaboration with Trecartin’s long-term creative partner Lizze Fitch.5 In an interview with Ossian Ward (“Supplies, Situations, Spaces”), Fitch remarks that the movie sets are always 360 degrees, but also that they are built “on the computer as 3D models first”. They are virtual worlds that are then materially instantiated, thus bringing a further fictioning character to the exhibitions (2014: 135). Fitch also remarks on the collaborative character of the work in which the performers (friends and other artists) contribute to the script “adlibbing and pulling in lines from all over the place” (2014: 134). The collective character seems important in the production of this different world, and especially in terms of a world that is not reducible to the expression of a single self-possessed artistic ego. Indeed, can Trecartin’s work be separated from a certain collective — or scene — from which it emerges?

  In general, it seems to me that one of the key interests of Trecartin’s work is this virtual-actual hybridity; a layering of different fictions that can extend to the gallery space as itself a certain kind of theatrical set-up in which to enter the fiction of the films which then contain further nested narratives and, as Patrick Lughery remarks, “screens within screens”. As another commentator, Christopher Glazek, remarks, a film like CENTER JENNY also blurs the lines between pre- and post-production, with the film itself depicting the production (behind the scenes as it were) of the fiction. The variety of perspectives and different cameras, and especially the use of hand-held camera, also adds to foreground the film’s status as a constructed fiction. Glazek also makes one aware (in his essay “The Past is Another Los Angeles”) of the very particular context of the films: the make-believe culture of that city which is itself a patchwork of different fictions and performances.

  Although shown in exhibitions, the films are also digitally disseminated (Trecartin makes them freely accessible via YouTube and Vimeo channels). The work overspills the boundaries of the traditional spaces and places of art; they are precisely “post-internet” in this sense. Indeed, they have as much in common with various popular and subcultures as they do with “high” art (if this latter term has meaning still). There is then a kind of formal “enclosedness”, or even a sense of self-autonomy of the films — they bring a whole world with them as it were — and yet, also, this openness to a wider connectivity beyond art. Indeed, in the future terrain that the films map out fashion and music can be as “ahead” of the curve as any art practice.

  In terms of the actual content of a film like CENTER JENNY, it is the layering of imagery and narrative that is also compelling and that helps produce the very particular affect — a kind of amphetamine and hallucinogenic rush. The visual composition of the avatars also arises from a linguistic, or discursive complexity: “logos, products, graphic design, interfaces” (Trecartin and Kunzru 2011) that, again, in itself produces a certain density in which a name — or image — contains condensed within it the parts from which it is made (its history is written on its surface as it were). The avatars, who reflect on their own agency as images, might be thought of as compressed file
s, or blockchains in this sense.6 A strange kind of fragmented digital subjectivity is at play here (characters tend to proliferate across different actors, just as individuals “play” multiple parts) but, again, with an agency, at least of a kind (a distributed one). Might we even say that Trecartin is “revealing” the fiction of a single self-present and consistent self in our digitalised and networked present?

  There are also the different speeds at play in the films. The quick cuts for example (as Trecartin remarks: “every year we acclimate to a faster pace” [Trecartin and Kunzru 2011]); the acceleration and digital manipulation of the dialogue (verging, at times, on non-sense; again, one thinks of drugs); and also the way in which the films present a “here now” — or a “pure present without a past or a future”, to use Jameson’s phrase — not least insofar as the filming is itself “decentred”: “every individual moment becomes the work’s centre” (Trecartin and Kunzru 2011).

  Kenneth Goldsmith has suggested in his essay “Reading Ryan Trecartin” that the dialogue of Trecartin’s films (and the published scripts with their very particular typography and punctuation) hark back to modernist experiments in materialising language, especially figures like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Goldsmith also mentions Burroughs and it seems clear that the cut-up is an important precursor, with its breaking of typical sentence structure and linear causality — albeit not completely. In both Burroughs and Trecartin a minimum consistency of sense is maintained, but the particular play with language and syntax certainly presents a different world or space-time.

  In fact, it seems to me that in Trecartin’s films this formal experimentation is key — or, at least, that form is as much the content as content is form (in the same way in which Jameson describes the formal aspects of Remainder as its content). As Trecartin himself puts it: “the way something is contained in a frame is just as valuable as the content inside” (Trecartin and Kunzru 2011). It is not just the offering up of a future fiction (a particular utopia or dystopia) that makes the films so compelling and, indeed, affective, in this sense, but the way in which this is presented in a very particular mode of fictioning. Indeed, it seems to me that the films are less “about”, or, indeed, predictive of, a given future than involved in actively writing a version of it.