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

Tue Mar 9 09:50:40 AEDT 2021

Prescient words, tim.
I also agree with the connotation of the profusions of signs in that it creates its teleology,  especially in the case of futurism. I have actually been around a discipline called Foresight Studies a great deal in the last couple years, threw a good friend named Derek Woodgate. And in this vein I also remember through another associate, Bruce Sterling, who once wrote about the death of science fiction, or it might have been a personal conversation. But I do remember is that he noted that in some cases he felt that science-fiction bends to the notion of near future speculation. So, in your commentary this idea that somehow late stage capitalism and the techno industrial complex wants to make for itself an airtight narrative so that it cannot feel any question about its future or speculate on its material gain.  The one thing that is interesting to me is that people in Foresight Studies are fully aware of the challenges that humanity faces in the next hundred years, while the techno-industrial complex is seeing itself on a linear trajectory or even what I call a “exponentialist“” trajectory without any material limitations, which we know can’t happen.

What has gotten my interest about this conversation is the notion of where human systems of care (age of Aquarius as an exemplar) fit within this meal you while the existing superstructure seems to be making less and less and less of a space for it. With AI, increased mechanization, there seems to be a coming future where there is an excess of labor that is somehow “obviously” set to function in the terms of the human imaginary and realms of fantasy, but this seems to be mainly a first world reality or possibility while in the rest of the world this xx labor will basically be seen as a human burden.

In the exponentialist era of technology in the 21st-century that is running straight for the situation of environmental struggle I wonder how we can put these systems in place while bringing humanity into a landing for the long term. 

Hello, and all my best from our new situation in Minnesota.

From: <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
Date: Monday, March 8, 2021 at 11:44 AM
To: "empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Laying the foundation for The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology

----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- 

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

Professor of Comparative Literature and English

B-1 West Sibley Hall

Cornell University

Ithaca, New York 14853

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