[-empyre-] Laying the foundation for The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Thanks, Renate, for asking me to elaborate on Jean-François Lyotard’s concerns about the technological “pull of the future.”  Before we transition into the second week of our discussion, I might just clarify that Lyotard was concerned about how the weight of the emergent digital age (he was writing about this in the late 1980s and early 1990s) might impinge upon the plenitude of thinking and experiencing life in any aquarian “now.”

Sounding the alarm over the degree of risk inherent in new digital technologies, Lyotard notes that the transformation of the perceptual event by the technical-industrial complex guarantees that the future won’t be what it used to be. “As is clearly shown by the development of the techno-scientific system, technology and the culture associated with it are under a necessity to pursue their rise . . . The human race is, so to speak, “pulled forward” by this process without possessing the slightest capacity for mastering it . . . In as much as a monad in thus saturating its memory is stocking the future, the present loses its privilege of being an ungraspable point from which, however, time should always distribute itself between the “not yet” of the future and the “no longer” of the past” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 64-65). The pulling forward of futurity, as evidenced by the economy of planned technological obsolescence, thus depletes the magnetism of the present as the energetic and ungraspable hinge between past and future. It is in the drive of this informatic pull of the future that Bernard Stiegler, similarly, locates the highest degree of risk in the rise of global media. At stake for him is the dissolution of the plenitude of fiction and fantasy that might rewire the ontologies of military-industrial-digital capitalism. Stiegler ushers the dire warning that “the technical network of the production and diffusion of symbols produced for a planetary industry [the system of téléaction] can overwhelm the universal desire of fiction and at the same time condition the entire evolution of humanity at the risk of exhausting its desire for fables” (Stiegler, Technics and Time II, 30). In my forthcoming book, Technics Improvised, I wonder about the impact of such a deadening profusion of planetary symbols and power relations, contrary to the imaginary of any age of aquarius. When technology so morphs into its own teleology, as the advance of a thoroughly predetermined futurity of technology for technology’s sake, little space is left for fiction, little possibility for speculative imagination, little space for the joys of thinking the future otherwise.
Thanks for introducing what looks like a creative month on -empyre-.
Best to all as we welcome the arrival of warmer temperatures in Ithaca this week.
Tim


Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu<http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853


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