Long has it been known that the future is cancelled. This doomed fate claimed by Fisher, and indeed others, has only solidified amidst climate crises, right-wing political control, and post-pandemic uncertainty. More and more, it seems that both metaphorically and literally there is no future to come, at least not in the dominant imagination of western politics and culture.1 This is troubling, of course, but not simply because the future has been stolen. It is troubling because something ‘out there’ in the abyss of reality has the agency to steal our futurity. Someone, something, an it, is a thief of time. Temporality has been infected, seized upon and warped; only a monstrous being could do such a thing.
View More Education, a Monstrous Thief of the FutureTag: capitalism
Exorcizing the Ghosts of Dead Futures: Fisher in the Anthropocene
Daniel Gerke explores Mark Fisher’s journeys in the Anthropocene.
View More Exorcizing the Ghosts of Dead Futures: Fisher in the AnthropoceneWith Love from Iceland
Iceland is, to put it weirdly, so hot right now. Iceland is circulating through the social imaginary in a number of big-budget cinematic vehicles: Dr. Mann’s uninhabitable planet in Interstellar…
View More With Love from IcelandInfrastructure and the Anthropocene in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
To read a Tom McCarthy novel is to find oneself weirdly and wildly awash in grids within grids, maps within maps, of infrastructural objects and systems. Protagonists and minor characters alike obsess over these objects and systems of infrastructure—over their grandeur, their minutiae, their flows and flaws, slows and jams, their symbolic ideological concretizations, their masterful and/or absurd designs, their volumes of strata.
View More Infrastructure and the Anthropocene in Tom McCarthy’s Satin IslandMaking Art in Dystopia
When contemporary artists work alongside scientists with “wet hands” in the bioscience laboratory, the results can test both scientific and moral imaginations. New uses of living material raise multiple ethical issues, and a concern for future…
View More Making Art in Dystopia