Future Theory - Marc Botha and Patricia Waugh (eds)

Future Theory A Handbook to Critical Concepts Edited by Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Patricia Waugh, Marc Botha and Contributors, 2021 Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Clare Turner Cover image: Temple IX © Chitra Parvathy Merchant c/o Smithson Gallery. Photo by Jo Hounsome All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Waugh, Patricia, editor. | Botha, Marc, editor. Title: Future theory : a handbook to critical concepts / edited by Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020051014 (print) | LCCN 2020051015 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472567352 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472567369 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472567376 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Social change–Philosophy. | Future, The–Philosophy. | Progress–Philosophy. | Change. Classification: LCC HM831 .F88 2021 (print) | LCC HM831 (ebook) | DDC 303.401–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051014 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051015 ISBN: HB: ePDF: eBook: 978-1-4725-6735-2 978-1-4725-6736-9 978-1-4725-6737-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha Section 1 Rethinking Change 1 Memory Enzo Traverso 2 Community Mick Smith 3 Remainder Andrew Gibson 4 Paradigm Patricia Waugh 5 Movement Esther Leslie Section 2 Boundaries and Crossings 6 Threshold Matthew Calarco 7 Periphery Paulina Aroch Fugellie 8 Exception Justin Clemens 9 Migration Mieke Bal 10 Privacy Alexander García Düttmann Section 3 Ruptures and Disruptions 11 Catastrophe Jean-Michel Rabaté 12 Event Mark Currie 13 Revolutions Aleš Erjavec 14 Interference Emily Apter 15 Irreversibility Claire Colebrook Section 4 Assemblages and Realignments 16 Fragmentation Maebh Long 17 Hybrid Roger Luckhurst 18 Network Graham Harman 19 Dissemination Jon Adams 20 Institution Simon Critchley vii viii xiii 1 41 53 77 93 115 129 143 159 175 203 213 225 237 253 263 281 297 311 321 333 vi Contents Section 5 Horizons and Trajectories 21 Climate Timothy Clark 22 Decolonization Nelson Maldonado-Torres 23 Resilience Sarah Atkinson 24 Hospitality Derek Attridge 25 Risk Marc Botha 26 Hope Caroline Edwards Index 345 361 383 397 411 433 449 List of Figures 2.1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, frontispiece by Abraham Bosse, 1651. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain 2.2 Haeckel’s diagrammatic representation of a siphonophore (of the genus Physophora). His key reads a΄: air-bladder or swimming-bladder at its top end; m: swimming-person or swimming bell; o: opening of the bell; t: sensory-persons or tactile polyps; g: egg-forming or female persons; n: nutritive-persons or eating-polyps’ 9.1 Roos Theuws, Gaussian Blur 9.2 Roos Theuws, Gaussian Blur 9.3 William Kentridge, Shadow Procession 9.4 Jesús Segura, I Can Be You 9.5 Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance 9.6 Mieke Bal, Nothing Is Missing 9.7 Célio Braga, Dalice 9.8 Célio Braga, Dalice 12.1 Badiou: Event 55 61 178 179 181 182 183 184 192 193 230 Notes on Contributors Jon Adams is currently a film-maker at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Interference Patterns (2015) which investigates the possibility and desirability of making a science of literary criticism. From 2005 to 2010, he was a researcher on the ‘How Well Do “Facts” Travel?’ project at LSE’s Department of Economic History. In 2011, he was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘New Generation Thinkers’. Emily Apter is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She has written numerous books and articles on translation and untranslatability, including Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). She has recently published a book on micropolitics, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstructionism, Impasse, and the Impolitic (2017). Paulina Aroch Fugellie is Associate Professor at UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico City. Her background is in literature, theatre, postcolonial theory and ideology critique. She has published widely on contemporary intellectual production in the Global South. Her recent books are Unrealized Promises: The Subject of Postcolonial Discourse and the New International Division of Labour (2015) and Shylock and African Socialism: Julius Nyerere’s Postcolonial Shakespeare (2019). She guest-edited a special issue of Open Cultural Studies on Marx: Semiotics and Political Praxis (2018). For his collaboration on the essay included here, she would like to thank Brían Hanrahan, visiting researcher at 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Mexico City. Sarah Atkinson is Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. She has published widely on health and well-being, arts and health, and medical humanities. Her books include Wellbeing and Place, with S. Fuller and J. Painter (2012) and Geohumanities and Health, edited with R. Hunt (2019). She is a co-editor of the Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (2016). With Marc Botha and Patricia Waugh, she was a researcher on the 2010–15 Leverhulme Project, ‘Tipping Points’. Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor, University of York. His many books include The Singularity of Literature (2004); The Work of Literature (2015); Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (1988); The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers (2019) and, with Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (1992). Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and curator whose work focuses on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her forty-one Notes on Contributors ix books include a trilogy on political art. Looking Sideways: Loneliness and the Cinematic (2017) demonstrates her integrated approach to academic, artistic and curatorial work. After documentaries on migratory culture, she made ‘theoretical fictions’: A Long History of Madness, and Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker (2016). Her film Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina explores the social aspects of thinking. Currently she exhibits a sixteen-channel video work, Don Quixote: Sad Countenances. Marc Botha is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Theory in the Department of English Studies at Durham University and Research Associate the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has written numerous essays on risk, fragility, minimalism and vulnerability. His books include A Theory of Minimalism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and a special issue of English Academy Review addressing ‘Fragile Futures’ (Routledge, 2014). From 2012 to 2015 he worked as postdoctoral research association on the Leverhulme Trust ‘Tipping Points’ project, with Patricia Waugh and Sarah Atkinson. He is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled, Appearing in Disappearing: On the Politics and Poetics of Fragility. Matthew Calarco is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, where he teaches courses in continental philosophy, environmental ethics and animal studies. He is author most recently of Thinking through Animals (2015) and is currently completing a book entitled Beyond the Anthropological Difference. Timothy Clark is Professor of English Studies at Durham University. He has published numerous articles and books on philosophy, literary theory, aesthetics and issues around environmentalism, ecocriticism and climate change, including The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011) and Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015). His most recent publication is The Value of Ecocriticism (2019). Justin Clemens is Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of many books on contemporary European philosophy and psychoanalysis and co-editor of many more. These include the monographs Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (2013) and, with A. J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014). Recent collections include What Is Education? (2017) and Badiou and His Interlocutors (2018), both edited with A. J. Bartlett. His current research is on the compromised role played by Romantic poetry in the colonial establishment of Australia. Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written many books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture and feminist philosophy. She has recently published Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, 2016). x Notes on Contributors Simon Critchley is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books on philosophy, cultural theory, art and literature, including On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008), Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) and Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019). Mark Currie is Professor of Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. His work focuses on the theory of narrative, literary theory and contemporary fiction. He has published widely in these fields and those of cultural theory and aesthetics. His recent work has concentrated on questions of time in philosophy, fiction and narrative. His recent publications include The Invention of Deconstruction (2013), About Time (2006) and The Unexpected (2013). Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on utopianism, science fiction, the philosophy of time and theories of Marxist revolutionary subjectivity. She has published numerous essays and articles and is the author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2015). She is currently writing a book about science fiction and ecocatastrophe. Aleš Erjavec is Professor and Director of Research at the Philosophy Institute of the Slovenian Academy for Natural Sciences and Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Ljubljana. In addition, he holds the Chair in Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities in Koper. He writes on aesthetics, critical theory, postmodernism, art and the relation between aesthetics and ideology. His works include Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Movements (2015), Art and Aesthetics after Adorno (2010) and Impossible Histories (2006). Alexander García Düttmann is Professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin. His recent publications focus on art, aesthetics and politics and include Between Cultures (1997), Seeing for Others (2012) and What Is Contemporary Art? (2020). He has also translated Derrida’s works into German and edited Theory and Practice, an unpublished seminar by Jacques Derrida on Marx. Andrew Gibson is Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of numerous books, articles and essays on modern literature, theory and continental philosophy. His books include Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (2006), Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (2002), The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898–1915 (2013), Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (2011), and Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity and Modernity (2017). Notes on Contributors xi Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He is the author of eighteen books, including Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018), Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009), Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018) and, most recently, Art and Objects (2018). Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005), Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014), and Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016). Future work includes an exploration of what is meant by Turbid Media. Maebh Long is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests include modernist and contemporary literature in Ireland, Britain and Oceania, as well as literary theory and continental philosophy. She is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014) as well as the editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018) and co-editor of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2019). She is a co-investigator of the Oceanian Modernism project, which links modernist studies and post-1960s independence and Indigenous rights literature from the Pacific. Her current project examines modernist discourses of medical and political immunity. Roger Luckhurst is Professor in English at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and essays on modern literature and culture. He works on Victorian and modern literature, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction. His publications include The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005), The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy (2012) and Zombies: A Cultural History (2015). His most recent book is Corridors: Passages of Modernity (2019). Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers. His first book, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (2008), examined the bases of modernity/ coloniality in terms of a paradigm of war through the work of Enrique Dussel, Frantz Fanon and Emmanuel Levinas. He is the co-editor of two special issues of the journal Transmodernity and is currently working on two book-length projects, Fanonian Meditations and Theorising the Decolonial Turn. Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, co-founder of the Slought Foundation and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory. Recent titles include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), xii Notes on Contributors Rire au Soleil (2019), and the collections After Derrida (2018), New Beckett (2017) and Understanding Derrida/Understanding Modernism (2019). Forthcoming are Beckett and Sade and Knots: Post-Lacanian Readings of Literature and Film. Mick Smith is Professor (jointly appointed between) in Philosophy and the School of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He is author of An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social Theory (2001) and Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics and Saving the Natural World (2011). He is coeditor of Emotional Geographies and Emotion, Place and Culture (2009). His interests are in posthumanism and ecological community, emotion, place, and environmental ethics. Enzo Traverso is Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Europe at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history and political ideas of the twentieth century. His publications, widely translated, include a dozen authored and edited collections. Several of his works investigate the impact of political and mass violence in European culture. He is currently preparing a book on the representations of the Jewish intellectual in Germany, France and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as an edited book on the history of revolutions. Patricia Waugh is Professor in the Department of English Studies, University of Durham. She has published a dozen books and edited collections and many essays on modern literature, philosophy and literary theory. She is currently completing a book, More than Ordinary Madness: Writers Hearing Voices, and working on a project on writers and wartime intelligence. With Marc Botha, she worked on the Leverhulme Project, ‘Tipping Points’, 2010–15, which provided the inspiration for this book. Acknowledgements The idea for this book arose out of conversations we began with each other after working on a ground-breaking interdisciplinary project – housed in Durham University’s Institute for Hazard, Risk and Resilience – exploring the concept of ‘Tipping Points’ across the mathematical, environmental and social sciences, and the humanities. We are extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust who generously supported the project financially (project number FCD128/BF) and to Durham University and the Department of English Studies for granting us research time to work on our ideas. We would very much like to thank, too, Professor Sarah Curtis of Durham University, who took over as principal investigator in the last phase of the project and was very supportive of our desire to think through the crucial role of the humanities in the evolution of concepts and theories of radical change as we move into an increasingly unpredictable future. The work on this book – the task of developing our ideas, gathering together so many perspectives and essays, thinking through their implications, organizing such a very large body of material, and editing and processing so much exciting and challenging intellectual work – has been immense. We would like to thank Dr Rick de Villiers whose great conscientiousness, good humour and editing skills have been invaluable: we are extremely grateful to him. Our editors at Bloomsbury, Liza Thompson and Lucy Russell, have likewise been models of patience and support, and so too our many brilliant contributors. We owe to them too, a huge debt of gratitude for believing in us and in our project. We had little sense, as we embarked on the intellectual task of this book, that of all the various challenges and obstacles to its completion, not the least of them would be the arrival, at the end of 2019, of Covid-19 and the first pandemic in a century. Writing on the unpredictable and on complexity and radical change from the perspective of the humanities was, from the beginning and in the context of climate change, economic precarity, decolonization and neoliberalism, hardly untimely: but we never imagined just how timely, indeed how urgent, this project would so very quickly become. xiv Introduction Patricia Waugh and Marc Botha Some seventy years ago, George Orwell imagined into being a Hobbesian society of Big Brother, a world where the corporate, the consumer-driven and the totalitarian have narrowed and even shut down independent and creative thinking: The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no more words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten … every year fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness a little smaller. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.1 Orwell’s major theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four was that the ability to imagine and work towards alternative futures depends on keeping alive the experience of an historical moment through language that is conceptually rich enough to grasp and convey its true complexity. Throughout his writing, Orwell sought to explore and expand the temporal genealogies and spatial geographies of words as they resist the will to essentialist abstraction. He believed that words and concepts – if they are to continue to resist conformity and containment – need to go abroad as well as carry with them the traces of the diverse kinds of company they have kept.2 For even in science, as the twentieth-century philosopher of science W. V. O. Quine also averred, concepts never arrive in single and discrete files but are deeply entangled with others in complex webs of belief.3 They are, as Deleuze too insists, ‘intensive multiplicities’ that struggle with chaos against doxa but resist the kind of simple verbal equivalence or correspondence evident in Orwell’s polemic against positivist reduction.4 That Newspeak shall not destroy independent thinking or the ability to recognize the threats to its existence, requires the continued exercise of creativity and responsibility in the construction and use of concepts to explore and describe material and intellectual environments. For Orwell, the social and political responsibility of all deliberative and non-utilitarian writing is to sustain and add to conceptual precision, diversity and richness. This is work that sometimes seems like a rescue mission, at other times a virtuoso performance, but undertaken always with a palpable sense of the dire consequences of its suppression or abandonment. 2 Future Theory What threatens this kind of conceptual richness in our own time? To behold the spectacle of symbolic as well as actual power wielded by political leaders and to listen to the conceptual impoverishment of much of the language of public debate might be to wonder whether Orwell’s nightmare vision of a future dominated by Newspeak has now – some seventy years on – finally materialized. The signs are everywhere: the ubiquity of social media sound bites; the global rise of authoritarian populist regimes that restrict or close down difference and diversity by reconstituting the wisdom of the crowd as ‘the people’ versus ‘elites’; the reign of bureaucratization, accountability and standardization; the hegemony of neoliberalism that continues with shibboleths of ‘growth’, ‘marketization’ and ‘healthy’ competition as if blind to the mounting evidence of economic crisis, unsustainability, the dire effects of austerity and global inequality. Buzzwords abound – conceptual short circuits – and spread with unprecedented digital speed to create fashionable trends and concepts, from ‘wellbeing’ to ‘wokeness’. But conceptual mindlessness as well as overzealous hygiene can infect critique too, especially when well-intentioned political slogans discourage acknowledgement or awareness of long and complex histories of struggle and resistance. It is in the context of this cultural and political backdrop that we arrived at our decision to present the question of theory’s future by exploring the concepts that seem most resonant and apposite in gathering and organizing the manifold ways in which our own historical moment seems one of transition and significant change. We asked each of our contributors to reflect, independently, genealogically and performatively on a particular concept that might be thought of as a keyword in articulating aspects of change and critical transition. We wanted to avoid the usual (dis)organization of the edited essay collection – by thinker, theorist, movement, discipline, kinds of academic affiliation – because we felt there was a pressing need for intellectual, historical and philological interrogation and creative improvisation on the key concepts themselves as they cut across thinkers, disciplines and movements. We also decided not to impose unnecessary constraints on the organization of individual essays, but to allow each author to approach a concept from perspectives and within intellectual frameworks chosen by them, rather than according to a specific disciplinary or rigid intellectual editorial template. We encouraged and sought difference and diversity in approaches, organization and, within generous limits, the length and style of each chapter. Our hunch, that allowing such intellectual freedom would produce writing of significant imaginative insight, as well as demonstrating the sheer range and vitality of contemporary critical thinking, has paid off. Read collectively, however, the essays reveal a remarkable unity of purpose, shared passion and overall intellectual coherence. We believe the volume offers a unique perspective on and debate around the future of theory and the contemporary problem of addressing futurity, even beyond our initial hopes for it. Part one: Concepts, transitions and the role of theory thinking futures The concepts we have chosen to foreground are included because individually and collectively they offer a multi-perspectival and rigorous investigation of the pervasive Introduction 3 yet curiously elusive problem of conceptual change in our time. Each essay proceeds through meditation on and interrogation of a single concept that reflects, engages or shapes the significant forms of innovation, transformation and transition in contemporary culture. Collectively they identify and interrogate terms most central to the urgent task of examining cultural change as a process of dynamic transition. Conceptual change is always entangled with historical structures of feeling, emergent senses of the new, that drive intellectual reflection on transition. Each generation refashions its conceptual tools in order to grasp and respond to the exigencies of its own moment and its ongoing reframing of histories. Crises often prompt the return to conceptual foundations and genealogies. Numerous of the most revolutionary approaches included here have been prefixed in a way which specifically draws attention to their capacity for rethinking the legacies of the concepts to which they respond. But at the same time, they show how it is impossible to ignore the sense of urgency which pervades much contemporary thought: the demand for something new which is less a reconfiguration or realignment of historical substance but defines itself as an openness to invention and might as easily be conceived ahistorically as historically, as a speculative trajectory as much as a genealogy. For the conceptual thinking that is theory is never simply tied reactively to an historical moment: to engage and reflect on new, older and emergent concepts that provide orientations for critical thinking requires some detachment from the immediate demand for pragmatic repurposing of tools for thought. This is true even of the current moment with its unusually intense, fast-moving and global sense of urgency around numerous political and economic issues: as this book goes to press, the coronavirus pandemic; global warming and environmental degradation; the rise of right-wing populist authoritarianism in the United States, Italy, Hungary, Poland, India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, the Philippines and the UK; the growing threats to the future of democracy as currently defined; new technologies that facilitate the rapid dissemination of information and misinformation; increasing attacks on minorities and a preoccupation with borders, walls and boundaries; the fallout of the war on terror; the ever-increasing gap between the richest and poorest. Then there are changes that threaten specifically intellectual futures: the shift to neoliberal and corporatist models of higher education; the return to positivist methods in the social sciences; the infatuation with big data and evidence; the proclaimed exhaustion of critique.5 What this adds up to is a widespread sense of inhabiting a transitional moment where many previously orienting concepts in public and private life are under strain: the time is ripe for a resurgence of theory as that mode of critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences most oriented towards conceptual understanding and the explicit refining and imaginative renewal of concepts. Not all of the concepts examined here, of course, have evolved in specifically academic contexts; many, like ‘community’ or ‘climate’ or ‘risk’ and ‘resilience’, have their origins in more public-facing forums. Collectively, they represent a wide range of international and global perspectives, as well as an interdisciplinary spectrum across anthropology, health studies, geography, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science and the new bio-sciences of complexity, emergence and mathematical modelling of dynamic systems. In exploring and inhabiting current and developing concepts of transition, they engage topics that 4 Future Theory range from the future of the Left to that of the planet; the direction of the academy and knowledge economies; the modes and futures of aesthetic practice, social justice, decolonization, capitalism, care of the self, science and democracy. Addressed too are the scientific ideas, technologies and social developments that shape concept formation and dissemination and are informed by them. Moments of crisis are often rich moments for theoretical work and the invention, modification and dissemination of new concepts. What might now be thought of as First Wave theory, especially the writings of the Frankfurt School in the 1950s, sought an accommodation between Marxist traditions of critique and Freudian and post-Freudian constructions of the subject, its thinkers initially driven by a desire to expose entrenched positivist styles of thinking – what Fredric Jameson would later call the ‘political unconscious’ – as part of the long arm of capitalism. Herbert Marcuse’s concept of ‘repressive desublimation’, for example, reflects this complex MarxistFreudian genealogy, but its revolutionary dissemination and refinement also hugely depended on political and historical events of the time: the Vietnam War protests and interventions, the civil rights movement in the United States, global student uprisings and the formation in the late 1960s of the women’s liberation movement.6 The Second Wave of theory, in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes referred to as ‘the theory revolution’, would go on to address, more extensively, questions of power, knowledge, subjectivity gender, race, sexuality – the foundations of identity politics – but through a more sceptical and deconstructive focus on representation, language games, framework relativism, and the idea of aesthetic and conceptual experiment as a means to break out of the ‘prison-house’ of language. This is the moment of High Theory with its rich array of new concepts and its reworking of former genealogies: Orientalism, incommensurability, alterity, aporia, the rhizomatic, subalternity, deterritorialization, intertextuality, the semiotic and the symbolic, interpellation, the (Althusserian) problematic, the symptomatic reading, subjectivation, the political unconscious, performativity, and the play of the signifier. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, many of these concepts were being displaced or absorbed into new conceptual vocabularies – a Third Wave – starting to reshape the landscape of cultural theory: the Anthropocene, bare life, exception, emergency, event, biopolitics, neoliberalism, populism, necropolitics, precarity, entanglement, decolonization, resilience, intersectionality and risk. These are terms that reflect a sense of changing global futures and rapidly shifting political, economic and intellectual preoccupations. Change is occurring too in the conceptualization of underpinning forms or methodologies: from structure to system; from linear and mechanical causality to non-linear and unpredictable emergence; from translation to interference; from postcolonialism to decolonization. There is a new emphasis on assemblages, networks, emergence, dissemination, distribution, tipping points, cascades, catastrophe, scale, interconnectedness, autopoiesis, order and chaos. One of the most important insights derived from the modelling of complex dynamic systems and affecting how we have come to see change in the present moment – from climate change, political shifts and regime changes, trends and social fashions, economic collapse as well as the spread of disease, intellectual ideas and social media hype – is that a pervasive attachment to gradualism and gradualist thinking has made us blind to the actual nature of change Introduction 5 in complex systems which is often sudden, catastrophic and irreversible. Change may be almost invisible, even if recognized as incremental, until a tipping point brings the system crashing down: but our Bayesian systems of probability thinking and even our cognitive and affective tendencies to avoid looking the coming storm in the eye perpetuate attachments to gradualist styles even as the concept of the ‘tipping point’ has itself gone viral in the last decade.7 The volume approaches the question of transition from multiple perspectives, demonstrating how the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention and intellectual discourse are specifically entangled in the contemporary world and how the practical and theoretical dimensions of cultural change often seem inextricably interwoven. The book is of necessity interdisciplinary in approach for the concepts we have foregrounded exceed any single discipline, set of objects or practices. In the last century, a variety of cross-disciplinary definitions have been offered in response to the demand for intellectual periodization and mapping. What is distinctive about this volume is that it seeks ultimately to address change on its own terms – rather than on those dictated by an academy increasingly driven by financial concerns and a cynical utilitarianism – by placing such genealogical, radical and speculative currents of thought into meaningful counterpoint. Its terms both implicitly and explicitly measure different models of change against one another: cause and effect are opposed to aleatory and unpredictable change; efficient causalities are weighed against teleonomic, circular or final causalities; linear models compete with non-linear models of change; radical change and progressive emergence are counterposed revealing how sudden acceleration and gradual transition, irreversibility and cyclicality, absolute novelty and differentiation are meaningfully contrasted. On the one hand, it is clear in many cases that, in order to trace transition, careful attention must be given to those situations in which concepts have emerged, as well as the concrete situations in which they are currently, and might prospectively, be deployed. In this, our aim is to demonstrate how concepts travel both within and between disciplines, and how these disciplines engage, borrow from, and reciprocally shape and alter each other. More often than not, sudden changes habitually acquire their rhetorical force and argumentative currency within specific contexts, even as they actively shape them. To grasp the internal and relational dynamism of concept and context with insight requires the capacity to recognize how concepts of or related to change often import specific sequences of ideas, constituting genealogical legacies not always evident at the time of their emergence, even under the most thorough critical examination. In this light, genealogies of change are by no means static and must constantly be subjected to critique and reassessment if the phenomenon of transition is to be understood. Yet it also seems necessary to remain open to the invention of concepts that not only reflect but also generate sudden and unexpected shifts; that define themselves in terms of an active scission of thought from its context; and that open transitional journeys along experimental and unpredictable trajectories. In this sense, the genealogies and trajectories of (transitional) concepts might be regarded as coextensive from one perspective, but as productively opposed from another. Their capacity simultaneously to shape and alter paradigms, to export other concepts and vocabularies previously regarded as incommensurable, is demonstrated in fields as diverse as fluid dynamics, 6 Future Theory synthetic and developmental cell biology, critical sociology, revolutionary political theory and avant-garde aesthetics. These are all remarkable for the manner in which they simultaneously effect specific changes but also constitute more general paradigms for the conceptualization of change across a range of practices, providing conceptual focus at one level, but generating mobile and even militant concepts at another. One of the noticeable features of many of the essays in the volume is the extent to which they engage conceptual change not only within the context of the humanities and social sciences but, more unusually, across the sciences too. The volume attests to a sense of how far we have moved on from previous ‘two cultures’ controversies or ‘science wars’ conflicts to a new sense of conceptual engagement and entanglement across formerly remote intellectual domains. Metaphors and concepts of complexity, networks, recursivity, emergence, assemblage and reflexive embodiment are central to the new systems sciences such as developmental biology and the fast-growing new genomic and post-genomic sciences: they are also now the dominant organizational concepts across many domains of contemporary culture. An important task is to look at the manifold ways in which such concepts are assembled and put to practical uses so that the degree and kind of mutual entanglement of concepts across cultural and scientific theories are available for further reflection. Just as informational concepts around life as a deterministic and unidirectional ‘script’ empowered the early development of molecular biology and genetics in the 1960s and 1970s, for the new genomic biologies of the 1990s and 2000s, it is the network, as a complex process of looping entanglement, that provides the organizing trope signalling the limitation of simple or linear accounts of genetic change and development. New concepts of system, change and complexity are now distributed through increasing numbers of knowledge economies. The biomedical sciences are being transformed by the post-genomic understanding of cellular processes and epigenetics that has required abandonment of classic unidirectional models of genetic determination resting on classic realist constructions of causality.8 Reductionism, as the key analytic process in scientific method, is no longer an adequate tool in understanding complex dynamic systems such as the weather or global finance or epidemiology. In the environmental sciences too, the scalar effects of complex emergent processes that are irreducible and irreversible as they cross unknowable thresholds and are distributed across human and non-human agents prompt difficult ethical questions around responsibility and collective agency. These new discourses in the life and environmental sciences, that have challenged the understanding of experimental and evidentiary processes, have required and helped to drive reappraisal on the part of the humanities concerning their own responsibilities in rethinking their own ontological, epistemological and ethical concepts. Such developments have also challenged models of interdisciplinarity that envisage pre-packaged individual disciplines retaining and contributing their particular concepts in constrained and appropriate spaces that simply reframe epistemic objects already securely positioned within a specifically bounded disciplinary domain. Examining conceptual change in this way recognizes the necessary vagueness and yet richness of concepts as epistemic objects as they are displaced from disciplinary ownership to enter places of experimental exploration and entanglement that may bring forth the new and radically different.9 Like high energy physicists assembling the myriad Introduction 7 differential traces left as various sensitive instruments move over the invisible surfaces of entities only observable through the effects of those instruments, new epistemic objects may also emerge whose identities are entirely a product of the experimental process. However, a word of caution. Working by accretion, entanglement, analogy or tropic extension, conceptual change enables new ways of knowing, but it may also obscure or marginalize other alternatives or build unwarranted ontological or ethical assumptions on the back of what are claimed to be new epistemological categories. Post-genomic techniques in systems biology, for example, were enabled by concepts and metaphors from cybernetics and then developed further with the appearance of the World Wide Web. But complexity and entanglement have now become catch-all terms that are sometimes used overextensively to rewrite the world in their own image, just as the central dogma of Crick and Watson turned the genome into a scriptwriting service for life. At a certain level of generality or overextension, concepts no longer explain very much at all. The new concepts of complexity and entanglement are everywhere and no more so than at the heart of the creation of a new risk culture with its centralized as well as more distributed mechanisms for controlling risk and enhancing security. Complexity is a double-edged tool, allowing systems biologists to escape charges of reductionism while enabling an extension of their conceptual reach, legitimized as ‘science’, to ever more domains of the lifeworld. Whereas an ontoepistemology of Uncertainty was built on the back of the New Physics, the new life and environmental sciences are elaborating newer models of complex dynamic systems, conditions of fragility, tipping point mechanisms, and modes of positive and negative forcing. But there are problems too in transferring concepts across disciplinary boundaries. Liberal inclusivity can blunt the politics of critique, and vaguely formulated concepts of interconnectedness, entanglement and assemblage sometimes require vigilant unpicking. Concepts map out colliding forces but the transference of systems thinking to the humanities in the mode of loose analogy can be used to deflect the need for difficult thinking within the more familiar modes of the humanities themselves and may lead the overenthusiastic to overlook the kinds of resources that are available within such styles of thinking. The current liberal tendency to see concepts around entanglement, assemblage, the interconnected and ecological community as necessarily carrying a kind of ethical virtue is deeply problematic and is addressed in several essays in this volume (for example, on network, community, paradigm, climate, irreversibility). That nature and society is now a compound has produced, in the idea of the Anthropocene, for example, the sense that the two can only be separated by violent means. Yet entanglement and assemblage involve categorically different kinds of agency, intention and effects that need to be analysed carefully: the flattened ontological landscape of the ‘actant’, the new materialism of vibrant matter, or the distributed cognition of enactive, embodied and extended theories of mind, individually and collectively, can contribute to the production of a vision of endless, indiscriminate and boundless matter circulating contingently across multiple distributed networks to produce chance collisions and productions of the new. But such visions, though seemingly liberating, depend on minimal definitions of agency or intention and encourage at times new kinds of identity thinking that might be seen to constitute a pervasive kind 8 Future Theory of inverted Cartesianism. Older or residual concepts – drawn for example from the tradition of historical materialism – that remind us how objects and matter are only powerful and ‘vibrant’ (a favoured term in the new materialisms) in the context of relations of production and exchange mediated by the infrastructures of political institutions and subtended by economic modes of production are important in reining in infatuation with the new and currently more fashionable materialisms. In being vigilant, rigorous, historically and linguistically aware of conceptual genealogies, theory in the humanities also promises to be dynamic, experimental and risky in reshaping but also, when appropriate, restraining concepts for future thinking and for thinking the concepts of futurity. The concepts we decided to foreground across the volume as a whole, therefore, simultaneously describe and participate in the process of change and are anchored in complex histories as well as reaching out to unknown futures; each essay is also a process of self-reflection on its own entangled relation with the concept it addresses. The concepts offer a comprehensive sense of current work, but they cannot hope to exhaust it and we hope that readers will bring their own sense of what is most significant to the task of mapping conceptual models of change. Some of the essays make challenging reading but that seems to us entirely appropriate: we haven’t interfered as editors to simplify but, given the enormous intellectual range of the volume as a whole, we have offered in the second half of this introduction a brief but systematic explication and contextualization of the orientation and perspectives offered by each essay. For these are all concepts with a trajectory – necessarily grasped as part of a genealogy that traces how terms gain their currency, participate in prevailing regimes of knowledge and effect generative speculation regarding potential futures. Transitional concepts not only bridge past, present and future but also move across the boundaries of any particular discipline or practice. Such transitions simultaneously reflect, and critically reflect upon, the sense of exigency which pervades much contemporary thought in its veritable obsession with change, innovation and futurity. In this way, the concepts explored in the volume as a whole avoid reproducing or reinforcing an existing lexicon, but all of them significantly expand our understanding of these terms, forging a new type of interdisciplinary cultural theory in the process. The transitional points and processes explored are critical in at least two senses: first, they confirm the sense of urgency and significance which marks the transformation of prevailing intellectual conditions; second, they maintain a critical, indeed self-critical, disposition towards the situations prior to and following transition, as well as to the process of transition itself. They interrogate the complex and vital interrelationship between intellectual, sociopolitical and cultural change, emphasizing the pivotal role that particular concepts and styles of thinking play in initiating, facilitating and coordinating these various concerns on one hand and, on the other, in offering resistance and opposition within the same sphere. While each essay takes as its main focus one concept drawn from a list of many possibilities, some reaching back to earlier moments of theory, others arising out of the current New Wave, the individual concepts/essays are organized into five clusters each of which designates what might be thought of as a key infrastructure of change; these are ‘Rethinking Change’, ‘Boundaries and Crossings’, ‘Rupture and Disruptions’, Introduction 9 ‘Assemblages and Realignments’, ‘Horizons and Trajectories’. This organization is tentative, of course: there are so many resonances and connections across individual essays and broader clusters that one aim of the explication and contextualization of individual essays and concepts in the second half of this introduction is to offer pointers for further deliberation and reflection on such cross-currents, entanglements and the kinds of questions they raise. Part two: Clusters, concepts and contexts Rethinking change This first cluster of essays and concepts is important in guiding questions with respect to the topic of transition: what are the conditions which need to be in place in order for change to take place and what are the concepts that allow us to recognize or grasp that change and its processes? How do these conditions translate into concrete situations? What sort of situations might be/is likely to emerge as a result of a critical transition? To expand on these questions, we asked our contributors to examine situations as they exist before and after critical transitions (remainder); the contingencies which characterize such situations that place change somewhere between the possible and the inevitable (risk); the ways in which entities and forces, including words and concepts, together constitute these situations (community); the way in which past events and our awareness of such events shape possible interactions and hence transitions (memory); and the way ideas regarding transition are ordered, culturally embedded, codified, transmitted and contested, beginning with the social and epistemological coherence of the forces which inform change (movement and paradigm). Memory studies is an expanding field across the range of academic disciplines, from the psychologist Endel Tulving’s concept of memory as ‘mental time-travel’ in the 1970s, to contemporary multidisciplinary interest in the forms that memory might take: episodic and procedural, implicit and explicit, autobiographical and cultural, conscious and non-conscious, recollection and recall, traumatic and reparative or reconciliatory.10 Without memory there is no identity, either personal or collective: change too cannot be grasped or felt without it. But how memory is conceptualized varies and so do its uses. Enzo Traverso’s essay is specifically an examination of cultural ‘Memory’ focused on the current epidemic of Left melancholia: but in addressing its subject, the essay demonstrates the political effects of the uses of different kinds of memory.11 The relation of memory as a process of active recollection that returns to a shared cultural past in order to shape a new future is juxtaposed with a concept of memory understood as a more passive process of recall, a witnessing of the return of the past that is often bound to processes of trauma and subsequent memorialization. It is now a truism that the Enlightenment break with cyclical accounts of historical time (revolution as return or renaissance rather than watershed and rupture) shifted understanding of the trajectory of history to one of linear openness to the future in liberal progressivist and in revolutionary, post-Hegelian accounts. This temporal frame and ethos of progression that underpinned the idea of Enlightened modernity began 10 Future Theory to falter by the end of the nineteenth century and has since undergone numerous legitimation crises. But Traverso argues that it is only after 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent tendency to conflate Socialism with Communism (as totalitarian politics), that a ubiquitous sense of an epochal break with Enlightened modernity is registered. Why is this? The embedding of neoliberal reason is the most obvious suspect, its hegemony since the late 1970s assumed by many on the Left to have stifled utopian thinking as we come to inhabit a world of incessant change where social and economic injustice remains static. From this perspective, revolutionary movements of the Left are simplified and come to seem simply pathways to terror. As revolutionary hope, expectation and anticipation are therefore abandoned, an eternal present (with the reification of the past as memorialization) now stretches toward the horizon of a non-future. Traverso, however, suggests that it is the fragmentation and loss of solidarity of the social and class base of the Left that has also displaced collective memory as a potent force in vitalizing socialist or progressivist movements: melancholy alone is not necessarily in contradiction with the desire for revolutionary change. But many on the Left no longer find hope in looking forward or back, and without a memory of hope, it becomes impossible to imagine a future of hope: for memory works protentionally as well as retentionally, organizing the future as well as the past and is stymied if the relation between them is interrupted or cut adrift. This demise of utopian dreaming coincides moreover with a marked turn to mournful memorialization of the past. The essay examines how in failing to keep alive in the present shared memories of past collectivist struggles for social justice, the cultural memory of the Left is preoccupied instead with memory as ‘witnessing’: no longer the recovery of shared experiences of hope, but of the lived experience of collective trauma. History and cultural memory lose their complexity, reduced to a binary confrontation of victims and perpetrators. What is remembered and memorialized is mostly the suffering of victims rather than heroic political struggles for democracy, decolonization and human rights. A landscape of fragmented suffering comes into being as competitive cells of trauma proliferate, each claiming the greatest intensity for its own experience, its own special right to mourn. This is a landscape hardly conducive to political and social hope. Memory finds its protentional capacities deadlocked. Mick Smith’s essay on ‘Community’ extends Traverso’s thinking about community and its loss beyond human cultures to pose the question: what are the ways of thinking community as constituted by more than human beings or human events and relationships? As we revere and look to nature as a model for political and cultural association in order to think community in specifically ecological terms – as in many contemporary modes of communitarianism – we might also look to the past to examine ways in which nature has previously been used as a symbolic imaginary for political purposes. A long tradition of political philosophy has naturalized or anthropomorphized the idea of the state as a ‘body politic’. Adam Smith’s invisible and homeostatic intelligent hand is used to underwrite the idea of balance in society as part of the natural order of things; Darwin’s and Ernst Haeckel’s later ideas of evolutionary niches, of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, and life as ecologically interconnected, provided evolutionary equivalents. Closer examination of this history, however, reveals Introduction 11 the dangers inherent in seeking to ground ecological community in naturalist thinking: from the earliest accounts of economic liberalism through to its neoliberal counterparts, political thinkers have sought to legitimate ideas of competition, economic survival, social and political organization, with appeals to nature. But now, as the human body is recognized as a plurality of ecological communities – microbiomes, friendly germs and the like – it becomes evident that ‘community’, existing at different scales, from the microbe to the planet, is not governed by any single overarching principle of nature, whether derived from grand narratives of the invisible hand, theories of economimesis or popular versions of Gaia.12 Analogical thinking cosmogonizes ‘ecological community’ as a grand narrative, but chimerically: there is only a complex patchwork of adjacently overlapping communities. The concept of ecological community has neither a metaphysical nor a natural foundation, nor is it a seamless interwoven garment stitching difference into identity. Each community, whether the biomes of gut bacteria, or the organization of the ant colony, or the network of human biologists who study both, occupies its own Umwelt or field of affordances though often exerting pressures on others (as in the concept of the ‘extended phenotype’). Organizational models of communities in nature vary widely from the pyramidal and the hierarchical to the horizontal and cooperative, the loose, and the networked. The analogizing impulse – from the seventeenth body politic, to Gaia, to current environmentalist discourses – that presents nature as one interconnected system is just as likely to be put to use defending the naturalness of markets and competition as that of ecological harmony and cooperation.13 The concept of community, currently laden with the warm glow of the interconnected, feeds off such emotive kinds of naturalization. Mick Smith’s essay shows how, if this unity appeals to romanticized versions of communitarianism, it also perfectly suits the interests of neoliberalism that communitarians should continue to think community in such terms. ‘Remainder’ addresses itself to what is left behind after change has occurred: in mathematics, where the concept is formally defined, remainder is what is left over in the performance of an axiomatic computation. In his essay, Andrew Gibson develops the concept in relation to the idea of the event, described by philosophers such as Badiou as the rare happening or unprecedentedly new beginning that overturns a previous state or experience.14 The true event is a mode of radical change, producing a vertiginous feeling of groundlessness like the visionary’s experience of the release of the Soul from its Dark Night as, for example, in the late medieval mysticism of St John of the Cross. Remainder in this sense is like being left behind in the dark night, a condition of accedie, of spiritual paralysis yet affective volatility, where the event, or even its possibility, remains absent or withdrawn from the frame of the picture. Though it is a concept important in contemporary theoretical discussion of the event, remainder’s genealogy is complex and its earlier mystical associations are often overlooked. Gibson begins his essay therefore with a description of the Venetian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio’s ‘Miracalo della Reliquia della Croze ai Ponte di Rialto’. The painting, at first glance, as its title suggests, appears to depict a group of onlookers witnessing a miracle. On closer inspection of their omnidirectional and wandering gazes, however, Gibson suggests that what is being enacted is a drama of remainder, the drama of those excluded from the miraculous, outside its vicinity. Lost in attitudes of non-relation, 12 Future Theory they remain in an atomized world, directionless and wandering. Gibson goes on to suggest that the secularization of remainder appears with Hobbesian nature – nasty, brutish and short – that is used to legitimate the shift of sovereignty from the divine to the earthly. In Rousseau’s political thinking, remainder reappears in a cognate capacity, for although nature is here reconceived as the Good, there is no place in it for human beings who have enchained themselves to the sovereignty of the state through a Hobbesian social contract; they must remain bereft of nature’s beneficence. In Schopenhauer’s depiction of the world as will and representation (the world too in Wagner’s operas and Beckett’s writings), art might appear to offer the experience of substitutive transcendence, but it is one premised on withdrawal from life itself, which remains in all its dreary horror. Surprisingly, however, Gibson concludes by promoting the virtues of remainder in our own time as a necessary antidote to the slick promise that we can have it all. In this time of complacent ‘boosterism’, the bleakness of remainder can protect serious political thought, a necessary reminder of how (toxic) positivity can promote a state of theodicial trance that averts the gaze from material need, vulnerability and suffering. Since the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the concept of ‘Paradigm’ has been ubiquitous in accounts of the rise and embedding of radical change in styles of thinking and numerous kinds of thoughtworld, from knowledge economies to modes of artistic practice. Patricia Waugh’s essay shows how Kuhn’s originality lies in a single, but highly generative conceptual move that brought together Aristotle’s rhetorical concept of paradeigma (model or exemplar) with Ludwik Fleck’s idea of a discipline as a loose constellation of practices and thinking styles (Denkstil) constituting a thoughtworld (Denkkollectiv). Working analogically, and therefore horizontally, rather than logically, parad(e)igmatic thinking evades theoretical framing and therefore intervention and can more easily scale up the singular model to a level of generalization that sidesteps positivism’s vertical procedures of proof: its processes of induction and deduction. The essay highlights three turns in paradigm’s role in thinking radical epistemic change from the 1960s to the present: from anti-critique, to critique and, most recently, to post-critique. In the first (anti-critique), Waugh argues that, despite the title of his book, Kuhn elaborates the conceptual underpinning for a fundamentally normative project that, in offering an alternative to classic scientific ‘method’, provides an historical account of and mode of protection for science as a discipline that ultimately (and inadvertently) weakens its claims to epistemological distinctiveness and authority. In the second, Foucault’s (untimely) critique of governmentality, as the establishment of an eternalized present, is clarified and developed as an essentially paradeigmatic method in its laying bare and analysis in the work of Agamben. Waugh argues that, from the 1980s until the present, this mode of critique, as genealogical historicism, provides the dominant critical methodology for many of the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Since Latour’s (2004) claim that critique is now exhausted, however, the construction of a paradigm of post-critique, claiming to represent a ‘revolution’ of the ordinary and connecting with the so-called affective turn, neo-phenomenology and embodied cognition, has called for a reconnection of expert knowledges with wider publics. But as Waugh suggests, such arguments draw on many of the same intellectual sources Introduction 13 and strategies – mostly rooted in philosophical pragmatism – as Kuhn’s own. The essay concludes with a reflection on the potential of more recent work on cultural affect to revitalize a paradeigmatic critical style through an accommodation between pragmatism and Marxism. Esther Leslie begins her essay by introducing the concept of ‘Movement’ through a reading of Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’. At the poem’s heart, she argues, is a depiction of the dialectical relationship of mind and world: the ‘everlasting universe’ flows through the human mind and both are mutually transformed by the esemplastic imagination. Leslie suggests that the poem condenses the many senses of ‘movement’ to be explored in her essay: the aesthetic movement that is Romanticism, the affective response of readers who are ‘moved’ by the poem, the revolutionary movements that provide the political context of its production. Working associatively and dynamically, the essay also moves back and forth across semantic contexts that have subtended concepts of ‘movement’ in the modern world. This juxtapolitical method places Hegel’s dialectics and Marx’s dialectical materialism alongside the new material alchemies of liquidity and crystallization, combustion and galvanization in the new sciences of chemistry; it places the rise of revolutionary workers’ movements alongside the new global flows of trade, manufacturing and industrial processing. The accretion of movement’s metonymies conveys the material ground of a new historical structure of feeling: one driven by hope in the possibility that history too might move in new and radically different directions. Leslie argues that when movement as a political concept appears in 1828, it is already accompanied by many other examples of the social, philosophical and literary preoccupations with becoming, with ‘flow and ingress’. Movement is everywhere: it is the concept most synonymous with modernity itself. Momentum, the idea of a gathering force, continues to propel the twentieth-century fascination with and praise of movement: the emergence of film, kinetics, avant-gardism, studies of the body in movement, technological animation, new cultures of enterprise and innovation, mass movements, mass production, and the search for mass markets. All that is solid melts into air. One might add as a coda that, in a time of mission statements, performance targets and automatized efficiency, the modern compulsion to perpetual movement seems to have come under particular strain. Why this compulsion to perpetual motion? For never to be still is to risk burnout. Or more likely it is to find oneself in a chronic condition of generalized weariness, of attrition rather than growth. And beyond this weariness of the self lies a more catastrophic awareness of the exhaustion and unsustainability of the planet and the feeling that, even if it is already too late, the time has come to slow things down: to move, in that sense, beyond modernity. It is a theme reiterated through several essays in this volume.15 Boundaries and crossings While certain transitional concepts serve to illustrate the situations pertaining to the possibility and structuring of change, others are better suited to describing actual processes of change themselves. It is to these latter situations that the essays in the second section – Boundaries and crossings – turn their attention, recognizing that the contingent stabilization granted by organizational structures, borders and boundaries 14 Future Theory must invariably be destabilized, transgressed or crossed. To understand this phenomenon, the essays here examine concepts which address the so-called margins of structure, experience and activity. They explore the idea of interstices and extreme spaces and positions (threshold), the question of the relative positioning of such spaces with respect to norms and centres (periphery and exception), and the relations between inner and outer, interiority and exteriority (privacy). They also address the way that art might render and communicate the difficulties but also the affordances and insights that accompany both physical and conceptual movements across such boundaries (migration). Matthew Calarco’s essay addresses what he sees as the impoverishment of traditional anthropological thinking concerning the formation of cultural identity as a ‘rite of passage’. A closed concept of transition here supplants the more open possibilities of thinking subjectivity through the concept of ‘Threshold’. The idea of cultural transition as a ‘rite of passage’ is not a threshold concept for it reduces (and contains) the process of subject formation to one of passage through successive but preformulated states, like Stations of the Cross, journeying from the pre-liminal, through the transitional or liminal, to a post-liminal phase of mature incorporation or assimilation to a final constitution of selfhood and place in a community. The concept of transition thus nullifies the force of threshold, restricting what should properly be understood as a process of unknowable and unpredictable ontological change to one of transition from one pre-constituted identity to another. From within such fixed coordinates, threshold is absorbed into the greater containment of boundary, while subjectivity is confined to predicates of ceremony rather than excess. By way of correction, Calarco’s essay turns from anthropology to examine the work of three philosophers and cultural theorists, each proposing a concept of threshold – through the figures, respectively, of the face, the visitor and the bridge – that articulates the desire for a more openended and indeterminate conception of the subject. He finds in Agamben’s extension of the Levinasian idea of responsiveness to the face, an openness to the other that reconstitutes the subject as a contact zone between the outer edge of what Agamben refers to as its ‘whatever singularity’ and an ever-changing and unpredictable outside: a process that constantly shifts the threshold between interior and exterior so that familiar concepts such as internalization and projection are mutually confounded. In Derrida too, the stranger who stands at the threshold, perhaps seeking asylum, is the other who stands outside the door; what awaits, however, may be a visitation, not even human, that will entirely throw the doors off their hinges. To invite in the unexpected risks opening oneself to a visitation that might bring ruin, loss of property, and of control. As propriety is rendered impotent, the subject is rendered vulnerable and without anchor, but at a threshold where a new process of creative opening to the other might begin to transform the subject. The essay concludes by offering a third example that challenges the anthropological ‘rite of passage’: Gloria Anzaldua’s figure of the bridge draws on the transformative subjective opening to a larger cosmos that is undergone in spiritual exercises and mystical experience. Anzaldua too abandons anthropological conservatism to propose the making of a new activist subject, a spiritual ‘thresholder’, who fights to stay in the condition of liminality. This subject becomes rather than merely passes over a threshold. She steps onto but refuses to turn Introduction 15 back from, or leave behind, the dilapidated bridge that is the mystic’s heightened state of opening to an intense awareness of shared mortality, the vulnerability of the body and suffering. Threshold carries an immediate sense of change that is accompanied by associations with the hierophantic. In contrast, ‘Periphery’ might seem to conjure the image of a neutral description of geometric space. Paulina Aroch Fugellie, however, begins her essay by insisting that it is a concept as politically loaded as ‘race’ or ‘totalitarianism’: periphery carries nothing less than the ‘wound of Empire’. No mere geographic descriptor, periphery is presented as a relationally constructed concept whose political effect is ultimately to slash open the self-sufficiency of what is self-understood as the metropolitan core. Aroch Fugellie’s essay first explores the genealogy of the concept, beginning with its construction in the social sciences as a means of bringing together discourses of political economy, social geography and econometrics in order to make sense of the development and spread of globalized trade and the economic transition from mercantilism to modern capitalism. She goes on to explore how periphery is initially constructed as the necessary outer realm of capitalist expansion, providing invisible labour and new markets for the advancement and growth of the colonial ‘core’. Outraged responses to this conceptualization drove the subsequent rise of ‘dependency theory’, initially in Latin America, but also in a context of Cold War and growing US economic hegemony. For Eisenhower, for example – in a classic gesture of supplementarity – the superiority and ‘maturity’ of Western cultures was held up against the arrested development of the periphery as a pre-modern and ‘backward’ remnant. While theories of ‘development’ or modernization, constructed from the core, claimed to address the problems of underdeveloped nations, dependency theorists (Dependistas) analysed the ways in which periphery was actually a construct necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist core and a creation rather than beneficiary of it. This stalemate provides the backdrop for the subsequent re-articulation of periphery in world-systems theory: a shift from the structural and fixed construction of geographic space as core and periphery to a more dynamic, chronotopic and complex systems-oriented account. The writings of Annales historians such as Braudel (with his concept of the ‘longue durée’) and those of Frantz Fanon and later postcolonial theorists provide the groundwork for the ambitious project of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-systems theory begins the move away from Eurocentric preoccupation with the nation-state to thinking capitalist relations more dynamically and world-systematically. (Wallerstein has emphasized the influence of systems and complexity theorists such as Ilya Prigogine on his refinement of world-systems thinking.16) The essay concludes with an analysis of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa as an ‘infra peripheral space’ whose primary function, from the perspective of the core, is now to render invisible the dirty work of capitalism and so help in the perpetuation of the neoliberal project. Southern Africa, mapped from this perspective, is a still untapped space of capitalist opportunity, natural resources and cheap labour – the recipient of buccaneer fantasy projections of ‘the rich wilderness of potential markets’. But the other side of this imaginary is the projection of the sub-Sahara as a place of abjection, dire poverty and ragged starvation, a chronotopic warning of the dark future that awaits the core, should the tectonic plates of neoliberal economies slide into a different gear. 16 Future Theory If remainder suggests what is left behind, ‘Exception’ is what exclusion positions as an outside that comes to define what is inside – as in the common adage that exception proves the rule. Its supplementary logic shares family resemblances with periphery, fragment, event, hospitality, catastrophe, interference, in particular. Outside, but somehow of the field, the set or the order, exception specifies a zone of application that requires its extraction from key aspects of the order that it constitutes. In relation to the law, for example, crime is the exception that is also its foundation. Law is evidently founded on a problematic of exceptionality: what is ‘exceptional’ in the context of the everyday – the disruptive effect of criminal acts, for example – is also, from a different perspective, the norm that makes possible the self-legitimation of its practices. As all orders produce exceptions, so exceptions reveal orders. Justin Clemens’s essay examines the formal properties of exception but pursues pressing questions concerning exception’s ability to illuminate key aspects of contemporary cultures: are some orders or kinds of order more ‘tolerant’ of exceptions than others? Is the exception everywhere today, as Agamben suggests, simply because the exception has itself been normalized? If so, does this normalization of the exception make our era exceptional? From what theoretical perspectives can such questions be usefully approached? The essay ranges across a number of possibilities, but central to it is an account of Agamben’s writing on exception as he thinks through Foucault’s reflections on sovereignty. Why is it, Agamben asks (calling on Benjamin), that the state of emergency in which we now live is the rule and not the exception? Clemens argues that Agamben shows how, as the work of sovereignty is to produce biopolitical bodies, ‘bare life’ emerges not so much as the other of sovereign power, but as its very nucleus. Under Roman law, homo sacer is the one who might be killed but not sacrificed, existing outside the law: but it is the law that, in its withdrawal, creates the possibility of the outlaw. As the sovereign decides on the state of exception, so the exception becomes the foundation for the law that it exceeds. The law prohibits, commands, punishes: essential to its operation is the biopolitical making-sacred of life that delimits the creatures and spaces deemed to fall within its purview. In this withdrawal from and creation of exception, the law legitimates its rule and order. In Agamben, exception is then the key instrument of biopolitics: it is the self-suspension of the law with regard to life. As Clemens argues, though, it is difficult to construct a general theory of exception. The essay concludes by turning to Badiou, by way of comparison, but here it is truth rather than sovereignty that is exceptional – as love, science, art and politics – and it is mathematical set theory that will provide the proof. For the event that is truth must subtract itself from being and knowledge of being: truths are exceptions to the law of being, which might only be mathematically established. Mieke Bal’s essay turns to the aesthetic to explore the concept of ‘Migration’ in a reflection on the practices of ‘Migratory Aesthetics’, the subject of an exhibition of migrant video art (2007–8) that she curated as part of a collaborative project. Exploring the medium of video as one of movement and kinesis – intrinsically well-equipped to help audiences grasp the experiences of migration and of migratory cultures – Bal demonstrates, through close analysis of a series of video installations, how this work contributes to the promotion of migration’s visibility in the transformation of public spaces in host countries. Such artistic work is seen to enhance affective engagement as a Introduction 17 mode of ethical non-indifference for it obstructs the impulse to narcissistic projection that interferes with a properly empathetic response. The installations are shown to employ a variety of techniques to endorse and amplify for participants the remainders and traces left by migrants as they pass through different cultures: slowing down time, for example, or fragmenting space, so that it must be painfully and painstakingly rebuilt in the present of the viewing and listening experience. In its interactive qualities and feeling of immersive but dynamic presence, video art is valuable in opening up the imagination to the richness and diverse experience brought by migrants to host countries, challenging entrenched views about migrant ‘transgression’ or the violation of a pure or ‘native’ monoculture. In this process, the unexpected is brought into the space of attention through complex processes of multi-modal and multi-sensory binding. Bal further shows how video is particularly equipped to integrate and draw attention to the complex double movements of migration and she presents a very different, more positive and functional account of memory than Traverso’s analysis of Left melancholia: memories of home are powerful in this migrant experience, as one would expect, but they are ever-changing, actively and continuously reconstituted rather than passively experienced as recall. Rather than a fixation on a past that is better left behind, they are crucial to the dynamic and complex reconfiguring of life in the new country. Time is experienced as multiple and heterogeneous: haste and waiting, slow and fast time, stagnation and movement, an unsettling present and unpredictable future. The techniques available to the video art medium can render these complex experiences through felt rhythms that are shared by audiences and participants in ways that sustain ambiguity and ambivalence, avoiding the propogandist or the merely politically correct. Bal’s essay reveals the often forgotten but powerful and complex agencies of different modes of the aesthetic, but also the shared capacity of art as immersion and defamiliarization to reshape experience: its therapeutic qualities; its availability for curative as well as diagnostic practice; its ethical and political capacity to change the meaning and resonance of the concept of migration. Alexander Garcia Düttmann’s treatment of ‘Privacy’ – its place in contemporary culture as a requisite for individual and collective flourishing – approaches the concept from a different perspective from more familiar liberal economic discourses on ownership and property that tend to defend, legitimize or challenge the relationship between domains of the private and the public, most often from a rights perspective. Instead, Düttman begins with the artistic enterprise and ends with the knowledge economy of the modern academy. Key to both, he argues, is the activity of thought. His essay, drawing on a tradition of cognitive aesthetics that focuses on the place of thinking in art, gives a new turn to familiar ideas about artistic practice as the defamiliarization of habitual relations to the world. This brings to mind Viktor Shklovsky’s original observation that habit devours the real, flattening perception so what we perceive is something that has always been there and always will be; even memory, therefore, that relies on the recall of past experience, becomes a kind of forgetting.17 Art is presented by Düttmann, however, not so much in the formalist terms of renewal of perception – making the stone stony – but more iconoclastically as an act of annihilation of and against the production of the inconspicuous and the normal. Without privileging theories of avant-gardism as such, Düttmann argues that all significant art is a process 18 Future Theory of creation from the verge of a forgetting that allows the world to appear as a different kind of presence. Aesthetic thinking is therefore an antidote to the stereotype and the mindless. But it requires freedom and space to deliver its insights. In the second part of the essay, he suggests how this is disappearing as a culture of repressive normality and surveillance is enforced so that value is reduced purely to markers of transparency and accountability. Is there a right to secrecy that is a right to thinking, to a space of interiority as impenetrability or privacy? Are secrets different from private thoughts? Literary writers – of course – from Milton to Orwell, Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou and Elif Shafak – have long and eloquently fought against state censorship in such terms. But Düttmann urges that it is privacy that is now the freedom most under threat. Why? Because even the academy, classically the space for freedom of thought, is now as much under siege from neoliberal managerialism as from other pressures that regard free thinking as dangerous. A slippery slope looms from the taken-for-granted assumption that the ultimate place of privacy is the place where I think, to the very real spectre of the gradual, even velvet-gloved elimination of those who desire to think for themselves. (This is Orwell’s fear too.) Unexpected bedfellows appear: as the institution of the university is oriented to corporate ends, the bureaucracy that attempts to capture and contain independent thinking is likened to the safe space demanded by the student ‘triggered’ by the encounter with the freethinker’s unruly ideas. If this collocation seems politically inappropriate, or dubiously incorrect, it is intended to be so: Düttmann’s essay is written in defiance of all forms of correctness as they threaten the privacy required for independent thinking. Is this simply the usual libertarian defence of art as dependent on the right to free thought as well as to free speech? He suggests that the plea for privacy as a concept carries different meanings in different contexts. In our own time, loss of privacy entails the sacrifice of art as annihilation, and risks bringing nearer the awful prospect of the annihilation too of that kind of intense privacy of aesthetic thinking that rescues this world from forgetting in its activity of building another. Rupture and disruptions The next cluster of essays, on Rupture and disruptions, examines a set of concepts particularly closely related to imminent and sudden change. Classical poetics presents the possibility of peripeteia as a sudden turning back that offers to heal rupture. But does tragic thinking still provide hope or consolation in facing personal, political or planetary demise (catastrophe)? Coming to terms with the phenomena of disruption and transgression as exemplary instances of change requires, in the first instance, engaging the phenomenon of change from the perspective of the situation which pre-exists it and the forms and thinking of totality that precede rupture. However, equally important are those exemplary points at which novelty, sudden change or critical transitions may be said to erupt (event). How might conceptual change and concept formation itself be affected through the disruption created by language, for example, as in translation thought of as a mode of verbal transition that highlights untranslatability (interference)? Are points of extreme rupture or critical transition in political and historical contexts equivalent to the reality of the tipping point in climate Introduction 19 science, and if the mathematical concept of the tipping point is translated across into the terms of classic political thinking, does that denial of reversibility destroy or make more difficult the belief in and political commitment to reparation and making good (irreversibility)? How does rupture or disruption constitute itself in programmatic terms (revolution) and does revolution make it possible to grasp change in terms of transitional sequences? Stretching from classical tragedy, evolutionary theory and modernism to the mathematical modelling of complex dynamic systems, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s wideranging essay on ‘Catastrophe’ gathers its argument in a sustained reflection on Beckett’s aesthetics as understood through his late play, Catastrophe, with its veiled allusions to the Stalinist show trials. What interests Rabaté most is the way that the unfolding drama plays with the expectation that the spectacle of torture and suffering will be transformed, through catastrophe’s final word, into a profane apotheosis that is the deified reification of a battered humanity. Why does Beckett refuse to meet the generic (tragic) expectations of his audience? The etymological root of catastrophe – a final reversal – also points to the expectation of the strophe, the final word or gesture, the Aristotelian peripeteia that will turn everything around: the sense of an ending that only the end might confer as it brings meaning to what has gone before.18 As Mark Currie also demonstrates in addressing the concept of event, catastrophe too operates in the mode of the future anterior.19 In Beckett’s work, however, the catastrophe is and is not, for the play ends not with resolution but with consternation and an audience wrong-footed in its impulse to applaud. Rabaté suggests that Beckett’s experience of psychoanalysis – analysis interminable – resonates with the thinking of the British object relations analyst, Donald Winnicott, especially in his last essay of 1974, ‘Fear of Breakdown’. This examined how, for the psychotic, and like the structure of so many of Beckett’s plays, it is fear of catastrophe that appears to drive the disintegrated behaviour. Psychosis arises because the catastrophe has already happened but has not been experienced. The catastrophe is therefore the focus of dread and imagination rather than of recognition, working through and recovery. Rabaté senses that Winnicott is touching on the powerful drive for prediction as retroactive sense-making that is also the dynamic of classic tragedy. One might say that although the logic and psychology of catastrophe are recursive in this way, the logic of Beckettian catastrophe is a broken one. Thom’s catastrophe theory, known to Beckett, also appeared at the same time as Foucault’s genealogy: there is a nice historical coincidence in how all three of these writers are preoccupied with a question of how one abandons the limitation of probability – the mode of the Bayesian brain – in order to live in a radically uncertain world where even small events might culminate in a sudden and unpredictable breaking point. Thom was working with the mathematics of non-linear systems, exploring concepts such as bifurcation points, catastrophe folds, catastrophe cusps, basins of attraction, amplification and positive forcing, and the butterfly effect. As Beckett questions the retroactive logic of ancient tragedy, and Foucault and Thom question the linear causality of positivist science and history, all three reveal our limited ability to predict and control, or even experience, as and when it happens, the moment of irreversible rupture that is a tipping point (another kind of event). A lesser artist than Beckett, Rabaté observes, might approach such catastrophe by advocating 20 Future Theory joy in the aesthetic spectacle of dissolution. But for Beckett that would be to make aesthetic gain out of and therefore betray the suffering that, in reality, has no end. Like Gibson’s essay on remainder and Calarco’s account of threshold, Rabaté suggests that Beckett fashions an art that remains with the impotence of the self in the face of the broken catastrophe of existence: it is an art that pre-empts any rush of joyful applause or even catharsis of the ancient kind. An ‘Event’, argues Mark Currie, is essentially a distribution of knowledge through time; it is a happening that we don’t foresee but later add to the ‘set of possibilities’ of what might happen or, more appropriately, of what might have happened. The question of the event has always been central to thinking about change, prediction and decisionmaking; it has become central in a different way, more recently, in the new sciences of complexity and emergence prompting reconsideration of traditional philosophies of time. Indeed, event is at the heart of many of the concepts addressed throughout this volume: exception, catastrophe, irreversibility, risk, paradigm, revolution, climate, memory and hope. Exceeding classic sciences of prediction, event seems closer to the Kierkegaardian idea of life that is lived forward but only ever understood backwards: surprise is its affective register, recursivity the temporal structure of its hermeneutics. Event is a complex relation between unforeseeability and retrospection. Event, like exception, is extraordinary, capable of collapsing the ground of existing orders but, as Currie shows, and like exception, is also ordinary, embedded, for example, in the decision-making processes of everyday life. Confronted with the undecidable, we resort to the imagination of the event in the mode of the future anterior. Projecting forward to a moment after an imagined event – on which we are then hypothetically able to look back – allows us to model the present from the perspective of the future as a condition of will have been. Currie emphasizes how so many accounts of the event, however, fail to distinguish or adequately interrogate the crucial distinction between modes of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. As an epistemological occurrence, the event is what suddenly appears but already exists (like the Winnicottian catastrophe discussed by Rabaté or in Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit). But the event that is genuinely new is an ontological transformation of the real. The question of their relation has a longer philosophical and scientific history: central to Hegel’s thinking of contingency and necessity as a relation of being in the midst of and at the end of history, and to debates between Einstein and early twentieth-century quantum theorists over the principle of uncertainty. For Heisenberg, the universe is ontologically uncertain, indeterminable and finally unpredictable; for Einstein, the universe is only ever epistemologically uncertain and God does not play dice with it: uncertainty is simply a consequence of the limitation of our knowledge. The ontological real event brings the unprecedentedly new into the world; it could not have been foreseen under any circumstances, and its effects are retroactive as well as prospective – the event changes everything. ‘Revolution’ understood as an episode of convulsive political transformation is now a rare phenomenon. Even the concept has been debased and vulgarized, Aleš Erjavec argues, overextended to describe almost any upheaval – trivial or serious – in fashionable mores: the market is flooded with ‘revolutionary’ products; ‘revolutionary ideas’ are proclaimed everywhere. A proper genealogy of revolution should at least, therefore, provide a correction to biases evident in both the adverse reactions to its increasingly Introduction 21 rare but specifically political use, and its current overuse in demotic trivialization. How might revolution be reclaimed and made properly available again for serious political thinking? One means of rehabilitation is to employ an interdisciplinary and genealogical approach to explore the close entanglement of the concept of political revolution with (the less maligned) uses of the concept in adjacent cultural and artistic contexts. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are deemed the first great eras of modern revolution, marked especially by the French Revolution. However, the coexistence of Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy – also providing crucial intellectual scaffolding for the revolutionary aesthetic of European Romanticism – suggests that distribution of revolutionary thinking has always been across broader cultural and intellectual domains. Similarly, if we move to 1917, Marxist discourses that drove the Russian revolution arose alongside revolutionary claims for the new artistic avant-gardes of the time as well as the modernist concept of a ‘revolution of the word’. Lenin used the term ‘cultural revolution’ in 1923, giving it much the same resonance as Mao in his ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s. Both recognized that it is not enough to promulgate revolutionary thinking by pivoting exclusively on a theory of politics or economics; key too are the cultural politics and practices required for legitimating and embedding its concepts in ordinary thinking and the practices of everyday of life (as in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony). But so too the spheres of art and culture might exert counter-revolutionary forces as in Kuhn’s reworking of the concept of paradigm. These are mostly unarticulated, part of custom and practice: think of the contemporary academy, for example, with its medieval rhythm of observing the teaching or seminar hour, its organization of the curricular around colonialist concepts of state and nation, and its commitments to Enlightenment concepts of learning and knowledge. This complex temporal multiplicity is important in providing resistance to the kind of justin-time thinking that drives the economic and political revolution of neoliberalism. One might argue that new ideas in one domain rarely emerge entirely in lockstep with similar concepts in others, though the key political revolutions of the past have mostly happened alongside other kinds of radical artistic and intellectual change that have provided receptive contexts for them. Revolution is closely related to other concepts addressed in essays here on event, catastrophe, irreversibility, memory and paradigm. Revolutions may, for example, be marked after the event and are distributed in time: Erjavec suggests that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century is an invention of the 1930s as modern ideas of political revolution were projected back onto intellectual history. His essay concludes with an examination of Rancière’s more recent idea of revolution that locates the capacity for radical change not so much in the idea of an exclusive avant-garde, but in the aesthetic as a shared and collective sensorium created in a revolutionary ‘distribution of the sensible’. It will become apparent, exploring these essays, how much the new systems thinking is transforming earlier structural conceptualization of mechanisms and levers of change: distribution is now a key mode of conceptual leverage, applied to everything from accounts of cognition to the complexities of global warming and also related to other concepts such as dissemination, event, network, periphery and irreversibility. Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty refers to Plato’s Laws and his questioning whether the teacher who insidiously imports foreign ideas into the state through 22 Future Theory translational swerves should be regarded as engaged in a criminally illicit act of ‘Interference’. It is not only that such ideas might have a disruptive effect on the behaviour of citizens, but they also traduce the aristocratic ideal of non-interference. Emily Apter demonstrates how each translator of Plato – including Derrida – has also interfered, through translation, with the master’s words and concepts. Even Plato’s own concept of ‘interference’ is variously translated, running from notions of criminal or ‘illicit interference’ to the more benign construct of ‘the busybody’. The structure of a debate is carried through the quality of untranslatability. Apter, however, regards this process not so much as betrayal, traducement or misprision, but more a mode of ‘cognising philology’, hovering always on the brink of failure, but with the potential to keep concepts alive as a way of saying rather than what is said. In this idea of interference, the untranslatable functions as a potentially powerful or resistant glitch, the vehicle of a micropolitical experiment. In some ways close to Wittgenstein’s idea of fuzzy concepts as complex nodes where many discourses cross and gather, interference through translation disrupts the quest for conceptual purity and disables the workings of instrumental language that flatten concepts to all-purpose or generalized ideas. Translation as interference provides an important tool in resisting reductionist world-systems theorizing that seeks global equivalences through overgeneralized concepts.20 Interference is therefore a function of the counter-hegemonic. Apter’s examples include ‘Occupy Wall Street’, for example, which began by interfering with the normative association of the concept of ‘occupation’ with violence, military and colonialist takeover. As Plato might have feared, ‘Occupy’ took the language of the streets and injected it into the language of the law, turning around its meanings. The essay concludes with a call for greater awareness of the potential of translational politics to be responsive to politics of interference: in other words, another call to recognize the capacities of words and concepts for civil disobedience. Though political thinking has never been premised explicitly on an understanding of history as resting on an Arrow of Time, the new climate change politics has brought with it an unprecedentedly bleak sense of irreversibility as the material world seems to bite rather than write back in defiance of culturalist and textualist accounts of nature. Revolutions, reforms, progress, reconciliation, reparation, all depend on an idea of being able to turn back the clock at least some of the way. Now the science of dissipative systems (pioneered by the chemist Ilya Prigogine) tells us otherwise, as do the various sciences that rely on concepts of emergentism and the mathematical modelling of nonlinear complex dynamic systems. But all living systems are non-linear and complex. How appropriate is it to extend mathematical modelling of physical non-linear systems to political and other kinds of human organization? Mick Smith has already warned of the limitations of indiscriminate extension to politics of concepts of ecological community. Graham Harman’s essay argues along similar lines concerning the ubiquity of the network. Concepts associated with dynamic systems theorizing are all too easily overextended to apply to political systems (and to world-systems thinking, Moretti’s style of distant reading, corporate communications) but when does this become a means of avoiding the specific challenges of a particular system or situation? Climate change and global warming, in particular, not to mention economic crisis and deepening political world instability, have produced a tendency to reach to complex Introduction 23 systems modelling as a kind of panacea. But complex systems thinking presents a particular challenge, for the possibility of reversibility and reducibility is removed and so too therefore the possibility of recovering original points of emergence, or of knowing the effects of interventions at different scales and levels, the measurement of specific effects of positive forcing, or of amplification through backwards and topdown as well as bottom-up causalities. Though Jorge Luis Borges allegorized a similar problem in his quantum manyworlds’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ [1941], it has taken climate change to disseminate more widely the recognition that we cannot simply reverse a trajectory – from forest to desert and back to forest, for example – that has already materialized through a complex process. There is simply no way to go back. Claire Colebrook’s essay on ‘Irreversibility’, like Tim Clark’s on climate in the final section of this book, examines tensions between the politics of climate change and the science of complex systems in order to think through the challenges of responding to the calamity of global warming. How to think politics in humanist terms when the sciences of irreversibility and the inhuman appear to pre-empt possibilities of reform or reparation? Like Mick Smith’s essay on community, the longer historical perspective is important, even as the current issues are unprecedented. For it is evident if we think about it that the political commitment to unmaking was never, in the first place, dependent on the Newtonian science of reversibility. Colebrook suggests that thinkers in the humanities should listen to scientists, of course, but know when the naive appropriation of concepts developed in specifically scientific contexts risks clouding rather than clarifying their own thinking. The utopian ideal of tabula rasa, of reversing history by wiping the slate clean and starting again, has long been discredited in a distinguished tradition of commentaries on Plato’s Republic. But Colebrook emphasizes that most models of political reversibility have not been as totalitarian or as absolute as this. To give up on the concept of political reversibility as unmaking because of an infatuation with the concept of irreversibility in science may disarm political hope and replace it with a depoliticizing fatalism that buys into the belief that the present is all there is: capitalism is here to stay and the wrongs of the past may never be put right. It might even (paradoxically) mean reversion to the oldest myth of all, that of the invisible hand or intelligent design or the idea that nature is hierarchically fixed. Bruno Latour is not the only theorist, though perhaps the best known, to point out the ironies of a situation where so-called progressive thinkers have so focused their energies on persuading us that nature is a construct – thereby inadvertently contributing to the denial of the findings of climate science – even as they buy into a fatalism around the possibility that there might ever be an alternative to the economic system of capitalism.21 But Latour himself rejects the dualism of human agency versus the passivity of matter as an evasion of the necessity to think through the entanglement of human and other agencies as a flattened ontology of human and non-human forces and relations. Colebrook’s essay leaves us wondering if climate change is not making Latourians of us all. How do we square political reversibility with material irreversibility? Once again, a key problem is how we approach this newly presented condition of entanglement; how do we unpick it? Can we? One might argue that like that of the network and the interconnected, entanglement is also a slippery concept. Simply because it is no longer possible to disentangle human agency from what is 24 Future Theory thought of as nature or the material world (nineteenth-century fossil use has always already changed ‘nature’ in irreversible ways but through a past shaped by human uses of the material world) then it is also too easy to assume that humans bear no special agential responsibility for its degradation: surely there is a need to keep different kinds of agencies analytically distinct however entangled they are in terms of the complex causality of dynamic systems. The new ‘vibrant’ materialisms and flattened ontologies ignore a Marxist tradition of dialectical thinking: more important to them is that matter is no longer to be thought as an inert substance worked on by human agencies but instead materiality is given power – vibrancy – as a co-creator of history, so that agency is distributed (as also in some distributed cognition arguments that work through a similarly flattened ontology of humans and objects). Like Mick Smith’s writing on community and Patricia Waugh’s on paradigm, Claire Colebrook’s essay shows how the concept of complexity as it is used in science and philosophical theory is able to scaffold entirely contrary arguments: that everything is irreversible (deflating the force of the political and the revolutionary) and that everything is reversible (capitalism is fragile and there is no such thing as nature). Whatever the road forward through this Scylla and Charybdis, simply to conflate scientific with political thinking around irreversibility is no way forward. That trajectory of thinking might all too easily arrive at precisely the same kind of fetishization of the object that Marxism set out to critique or where, if the distribution of power is simply a property of the network, it is therefore possessed equally by no one and no thing. But if we ignore the political in our accounts of nature then it is all too easy to forget that the industrial capitalism of wealthy nineteenth-century nations has produced a world where it is those at the periphery who are suffering and will suffer most from its environmental fallout in the future. Colebrook’s essay suggests that entanglement – another concept that runs through many of the essays here, like distribution, and like network – is in need of some careful conceptual unpicking. One might detect a tension, in particular, between new and old materialisms.22 Assemblages and realignments If rupture and disruption open up the possibility of novelty, it remains to be demonstrated how the situations they leave in their wake might be reconfigured and realigned to constitute recognizable situations. To this end, it seems necessary to investigate specifically those concepts that describe transitions in terms of process – processes which grasp the dynamics of a transition by emphasizing the continuity across that which is prior and subsequent to a particular shift (fragmentation), as well as those which place their emphasis on emerging assemblages themselves. Other concepts attend to the unexpected and innovative recombinations of information or other material across a variety of situations or transhistorically or across different media and disciplines (network). Regardless of whether we finally ascribe to the view that contemporaneity is marked by increasing complexity, or whether it is marked by an increased awareness of complexity, it is clear that our conceptual frameworks must be expanded to include the increasing number of situations in which strands of information once considered independent are now shown to be interdependent Introduction 25 (hybrid). How do these points of coherence come to be mediated and communicated, particularly in the contemporary situation (dissemination), and how do stable infrastructures and systems emerge that seek to regulate or organize change and how do they operate (institution)? What is the fragment? Maxim, aphorism, epigram, sketch – do we interpret the fragment as a clear-eyed mode of formal escape from the illusion of completion, a writing out of risk whose natural tendency is towards interruption and disruption? Or do we read fragment as a mode of impossible nostalgia or desire, a yearning for the possibility of a lost or yet-to-come plenitude? Is it part of a totality that opposes from within or does it lie outside of all systems? Is it a scrap of a pre-existing whole or a hypothetical structure never to be completed? If we agree with Schlegel, Maebh Long suggests in her essay on ‘Fragmentation’, it is equally difficult for the mind to have a system, as it is for the mind to have none: the turn to the fragment raises issues around philosophical self-reference and excess even as it appears to offer a means of making the indeterminism of the world manageable, moving between order and chaos. As a mourning for lost unity, it produces the Romantic fetish of the ruin; as resistance to totalization, it produces the postmodern cut-up. One might of course insert modernism between these two: one of the most famous lines in modernist poetry, in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), tells of how ‘these fragments [the poem itself] I have shored against my ruin’. Like the interference of the untranslatable, the fragment is that which resists recuperation or conversion into system, purity, originality and totality. Even to read a succession of fragments, Long argues, is to be embarked on an unending poeisis of ‘unworking’: for there is no preformulated narrative, cognitive schema or script that might guide the making of a pattern. The fragment points to art as a counterpoint without resolution: the emergent remade with each encounter or, to recall Eliot, the pattern new in every moment. Maebh Long concludes with a close reading of essays by Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy that continue to circle around the paradoxes of the fragment. As that which asserts the yearning for, but also undoes the impulse to system, the fragment is ultimately at one with the event of being we call existence. As that which nothing completes, being is the absolute fragment, the absolute non-absolute. And should the fragment have its way, nothing and no one will have the final word. Whereas fragment plays with the idea of parts breaking up and splitting off from imaginary wholes, ‘Hybrid’ seems to work in the opposite direction: existing parts coming together in new and imaginary wholes. Originally a technical term from botany, the concept of the hybrid acquired new life as the buzzword of 1980s postcolonialism, part of its resistance to discourses of ethnic, racial and national ‘purity’. It was in the work of Homi Bhabha, in particular, that the political and theoretical celebration of hybridity and fascination with the in-between first became legion. In the 1990s too, hybridity featured in feminist and posthumanist discourses of the cyborg and the monstrous woman, constructed against a purification of the ‘natural’ that has mostly served to exclude or marginalize actual women from cultural power. Of late, the hybrid, like the concept of the untranslatable, the exception, and the fragment, or the entangled and distributed, seems to flourish wherever a tropic weapon is required against the bounded, the pure, the categorical and the taxonomic. Hybridity has been hybridized 26 Future Theory in this current fascination with entanglement, intra-action, species crossing, genetic engineering, artificial life and the dissolution of boundaries. It was Latour again who insisted in 1993 that ‘so many hybrids’ have undone the promised land of modernity.23 But as Roger Luckhurst demonstrates, however, culturalist biases in 1980s and 1990s accounts of hybridity suppress a much darker and more complex genealogy and this provides a context for the new hybrids of the twenty-first century. Luckhurst traces three moments in this history, exploring through this more complex genealogy the negative consequences of unthinking acceptance of essentialist reductions that ignore the political and philological histories of seemingly neutral concepts. His essay begins with the first use of the term in 1720 to describe the production of a plant, a ‘hybrid pink’, that became known as ‘Fairchild’s Mule’. Successful botanical hybridization of this kind, appearing at the moment of publication of Linnaeus’s great taxonomy, was read as a portent of humans’ growing ability to intervene in and change the course of nature. But Luckhurst describes how, by the mid-nineteenth century, hybridity moved from plant to human as fears around miscegenation prompted Josiah Nott’s work on the Mulatto, the idea of the racialized ‘mongrel’ that inspired the first evolutionary formulation of races as separate species. This ‘scientific’ work reflected and fed growing colonial anxiety concerning the ‘hybrid zone’, a condensation and fetishization of fears and fantasies around racialized encounters as dangerous contact points of sexual transaction and potential inter-racial breeding. This particular spectre of the hybrid, racialized and sexualized, intensified fantasies of racial purity. In short, Luckhurst reveals how the concept of hybridity, the darling of postmodern jouissance, had fifty years earlier carried the very same spectral anxieties that gave rise to the catastrophic negative eugenics of the twentieth century. The concept of the network has become prominent in conjunction with the orientation of much systems thinking to the idea of the interconnected and the entangled that reiterates too the sense of living in a world that is increasingly digitally ‘wired’. It is arguable that whereas Foucault dominated critical thinking until 2010 or thereabouts, Latour has substantially influenced the shift from Foucauldian critique to the current preoccupation with circulation, surfaces, assemblages, interconnectedness, chance and a flattened hierarchy of ‘actors’. ‘Keep it flat’ is the new mantra. Latour’s early work included his anthropological study of contemporary laboratory life as a distributed and complex process revealing how the artefactual is involved in the assembling of what is established as ‘fact’. This led to his thinking through of the assemblage as a way of challenging those fallacies of misplaced concreteness that he saw reflected in sociological concepts such as ‘the social’. His Actor-Network Theory, revolutionary in its effects on the social sciences, has been slower to infiltrate and arrive at a similarly dominant position in the humanities (despite the efforts of the new postcritique) – perhaps because the deconstruction of facts, systems and structures and the ongoing gathering of discourses into various kinds of new assemblage is already intrinsic to its work. Over the last decade, however, ANT has started to creep more visibly into humanities’ styles of thinking: around social networks, the circulation of texts, the deconstruction of previous conceptualizations of the social, curation as assemblage, and the network as a mode of resistance to reifications of system and structure. Introduction 27 Graham Harman begins his essay on ‘Network’ querying the deeper sources of its appeal, tracing how the concept of the network inserts itself into two powerful trajectories from ancient philosophy, pre- and post-Socratic. In this ancient thinking through of relations between the One and the Many, if the Many is a splintering from the One, how does it emerge? Or in the alternative atomistic universe of the discretely Many, how does the Many assemble into the higher structure of the One? The question posed bears some resemblance to that raised by the fragment. From Parmenides through to Leibniz, and from logical atomism to contemporary objectoriented ontologies, the relation between the Many and the One is problematic (or simply refused as in Deleuze’s thinking). Harman suggests that part of the appeal of the network too is that it seems to avoid the tendency to polarize ‘everything is connected’ against ‘nothing is connected’, that is to say, the view that only relations are real, or only material particles are real. In that sense, ANT’s insistence on a flat ontology might seem to be a contemporary version of neutral monism or of early twentieth-century process philosophy such as that of A. N. Whitehead that shaped Deleuze’s thinking, but ANT avoids positing the idea that there is anything primary, either relational, evental or substantial, behind the network. The network is all there is and – to borrow from the title of Iris Murdoch’s first novel – there is no getting under it. Instead Latour suggests an economy of distributed agential force: we should simply accept that all things that have effects on something else are actors. Harman too argues that although Latour may seem to avoid privileging matter or relation, what is privileged is the network itself. A thing is nothing unless it is acting. Harman detects a similar move interestingly in Karen Barad’s theory of intra-action and agential realism – a version of the Uncertainty Principle that argues that new epistemic objects come into being, without prior existence, as entanglements of observer and observed. For Harman, both Latour and Barad are idealists, rather than realists, though both situate themselves in a broad category of realism. Both insist that objects are shorn of pre-existing qualities or attributes that exist prior to entry into the network. The Network or (as I’ve suggested above) the condition of entanglement is all. Harman concludes that only a properly robust realism might counter this version of infatuation with the interconnected. Objections to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory are still relevant, he argues: just because the object cannot be separated from its measurement, this doesn’t entail that its position and momentum exist only in the observer’s relation to it. There are real things, insists Harman, but they are not to be found in network theories. The hermeneutic appeal of the network, as that of social constructionism, in disciplines whose positivist reifications – of ‘the social’, for example – continue to exert their grip is not hard to understand. The question remains: is there a further appeal of the network as a contemporary philosophy of becoming, a way of asserting relationality against atomism and fragmentation, openness against closure and stasis? Is network simply a reflection of the contemporary obsession with interconnection that runs through much digital, ecological and popular forms of relational thinking? Or is it another way of decentring the subject? What new tools, if any, does network provide for the humanities, and for what purpose? We have identified here a further contemporary movement concept, like entanglement and distribution, that runs through and is addressed in many of the essays here: interconnectedness. 28 Future Theory This takes us neatly to the next essay that addresses the problematic of ‘Dissemination’, related to that of network, particularly in a digital age, but also importantly captures political anxieties around relations between democracy and expertise, the opposition of elitism and populism, in an era of data-glut and information overload. This is the focus of Jon Adams’s essay as it explores how questions around the dissemination of expert knowledges can no longer ignore the growing threat to established – especially liberal – models of representative democracy from varieties of right-wing populism, particularly those authoritarian modes currently on the rise across the globe. Populist regimes have in common the desire to limit freedom of choice by excluding political alternatives, preferring majoritarian political models that interpellate a narrow construction of ‘the people’ as standing in for the wider demos and opposed to what are constructed as ‘elites’. What has this populist turn to do with dissemination? In an age of social media and increasing surveillance and shaping of public opinion through the digital medium and the sound bite, Adams examines how the idea of information as transmission (signals extracted from noise in communication models) has always been at odds with hermeneutic practices such as those favoured in the humanities that have mostly sought to protect complex processes of understanding through ‘creative misreading’, the concept of the tacit, the embodied, the ‘symptomatic’ and the hidden. The issue of how ideals of democracy might be reconciled with epistemic ideals of expertise has always been a challenging one: expertise is mostly – one might argue, almost by default – provided by elites (though the term ‘experts by experience’ has recently entered a variety of health contexts). As populists now seek to revive and manipulate the concept of the wisdom of the crowd, however, experts find themselves increasingly deemed dispensable. Adams argues that the fashionable academic concept of ‘knowledge exchange’ is to be seen, in this context, as a feeble attempt to mitigate the inevitable gap between expertise and democratic dissemination in the context of increasingly populist modes of governmental reason. It remains to be seen, one might add, whether current experiments in new democratic forms, such as citizens’ assemblies, or devolved parliaments, may provide workable alternatives.24 Institutions are unavoidable in any discussion of assemblage, as Simon Critchley points out. But they come in many shapes and forms. His essay on ‘Institution’ is a personal reflection, from within the discipline of philosophy, on his own extensive career experience of teaching and practising as an academic philosopher in different kinds of academic institutions, on both sides of the Atlantic. The period in question coincides, of course, with an acceleration of external pressures, economic and political, that have pushed the academy, its ethos and practices, away from institutional, towards a more evidently corporate status. (Wendy Brown and others have written eloquently in recent years on the implications and meanings of this neoliberalization of universities; it is the focus too of Düttmann’s essay on privacy.)25 But Critchley’s interest is in whether there are sources elsewhere that might suggest viable alternatives to current models of academic and pedagogic organization and practice, that might allow more genuine forms of collaborative and creative thinking to flourish. For the major threat to academic values, particularly in the humanities, is to its long-enshrined commitment to a more or less Kantian idea of autonomy as giving the law unto oneself in a space that is free from coercion. Critchley too acknowledges the forces militating Introduction 29 against this ideal: managerialism (the demand for transparency, accountability and the preoccupation with calibrating ‘performance indicators’); commercialization (‘knowledge partnerships’, the demand for ‘translational’ or ‘for-profit’ research, the ethos of competition, league tables and the like). But the current university structure, particularly in the humanities, is still one broadly derived from the Humboldtian University of the nineteenth century, hierarchical and bureaucratic, rigidly guarding disciplinary silos. Critchley sees the Humboldtian philosopher as a civil servant struggling to retain Kantian ideals of integrity, hoping to be more than an instrument of the state: as in the contemporary academy, he or she fights to resist the transformation of a discipline into a knowledge factory. For Critchley, idealizing the Humboldtian model as an alternative to the contemporary ‘research’ university is not a valid solution to neoliberal corporatization. Neither offer models for genuinely collaborative, creative and rigorous thinking. Critchley begins with some reflection on the earliest academies – Plato’s, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’s Garden. Small-scale and face to face, albeit aristocratic and privileged, their commitment was to produce disciples through engagement with masters in an ongoing process of close collaboration and dialogue. The three are offered as exemplars, not so much nostalgically, but for what they offer in thinking through the requirements for more optimal conditions for creative thinking in the contemporary academy. The new universities of the 1960s were experiments with organizational structures, pedagogy, modes of interdisciplinarity (one might add that the ‘Centre’ and the ‘Institute’ are contemporary counterparts of these experiments), but since then corporatism has largely triumphed. Can alternatives still be envisaged? Critchley argues that one small beginning might be to move away from the current conceptualization of ‘research’ that has largely replaced the concept of ‘scholarship’ in the humanities, a shift reflected in the power of the Research Exercise Framework to drive academic research and academic appointments in the UK. What if we returned instead to thinking of the classroom as a laboratory for research and teaching as a way back to the dialogic creativity of the ancient academies? Is it any longer possible to recover the ideal of a culture of paideia in the original Greek sense? Are there elements in the current system that might be transformed or repurposed for more collaborative kinds of thinking? Horizons and trajectories Where is all of this heading, and what is it leading to? We end by turning attention to horizon as the outer limit of space – phenomenological, global and planetary – and the outer limit of time – the trajectory into an unknowable future. In focusing throughout on transition and change, the volume as a whole has already been directed towards questions of the future and futurity and not simply the future of theory and of the concepts that seem crucial in this trajectory. The final cluster of essays, however, aims to elaborate notions of transition by weighing the study of futurity in terms both of what it promises and the threats it makes apparent (climate). Ranging across the politico-theological domains of decision, commitment and faith, the section addresses questions of ethics and the relationships between human and non-human entities (hospitality), the ways in which the concept of modernity is finally being left behind or 30 Future Theory radically transformed through other spatial and global perspectives (decolonization), the tensions which exist between a hopeful commitment to futurity and the risks and paradoxes this commitment entails (hope). The deep contradictions which inhabit our apparent capacity to shape the future connect with earlier analyses of memory, reversibility and periphery and questions about how we confront the unknown and the unpredictable (resilience) weighed against the growing recognition that catastrophe is, at this point, a likelihood. Addressing the question of ‘Climate’ and climate change from both a broader humanistic and a more focused literary critical and theoretical perspective, Timothy Clark’s essay lays out the challenges facing academic disciplines as they seek the means to think through and respond to the epic scale of threats to planetary existences. Since the early 2000s, global warming has profoundly impacted all academic disciplines and not simply those directly engaged with it, such as the earth and environmental sciences. Everywhere, as we have seen throughout this volume, a sense of the continuous seems confounded, the future cancelled or emptied of hope. The incalculable and the discontinuous are no longer remote cosmological or quantum physics hypotheses; they are the reality of every horizon. One response is to bury one’s head in the sand but Clark recognizes that, as climate change impinges more and more on our lives and futures, every discipline will be required to rethink its aims and objectives, norms and practices, politics and ethos and ask difficult questions: is rereading Shakespeare in the new framework provided by the concept of the late Holocene any longer a useful contribution? What might a scholarly climate activism look like? On a more pragmatic level, Clark addresses his own discipline of literary studies: how do literary humanities disciplines – whose traditional scale is that of the individual in society, or the subjective and intersubjective, and whose classic genres are narrative or lyric – even begin to think at the level of scale and complexity demanded by the complex dynamics of climate change and global warming? How does the moral structure of the tragic, for example, confront the deep wrongs done to the Earth, rather than to a human being or a group? Like Rabaté, Clark sees that the tragic in the mode of the catastrophic can all too easily become a way of cheering oneself up, like joy-in-destruction, or a selfcongratulatory Stoicism: is this the ecocritical reinterpretation of King Lear? If one catastrophizes the future as a wheel of fire, how to persuade others to make a promise to it? Traditional liberal or even Fabian defences of educating a citizenry may be one riposte to Clark – the importance of the small but valuable engagements that might, for example, encourage the need for more complex deliberation as a spur to political activism and pressure on governments, or the cultivation of a more expansive kind of caring (for the Earth as well as the creatures on it). But Clark asks us to think hard about our disciplinary practices and modes of thinking: whether the ‘ecocritical reading’ is ultimately an empty symbolic politics (what Stanley Fish once called ‘professional correctness’) that runs the risk of simulative displacement of the real thing? Or will the key task for humanities disciplines be the struggle to hold onto the kind of culture that has allowed them to flourish in the first place? As Clark observes, bad news, without real solutions, offers no future at all. But his essay has also pinpointed another problematic concept that runs through many of these essays: the emergence of the concept of scale is one that has arrived in the foreground of thinking around systems Introduction 31 and with the reorientation of theory to questions concerning world-systems, the global and the planetary. Turning from climate to ‘Decolonization’ also reflects issues around scale but offers greater hope that conceptual change might help to bring about political change in the present and future. The concept of decolonization is often used interchangeably with that of independence by movements that oppose colonization: decolonization, it is assumed, simply means the struggle for political and economic independence. Nelson Maldonado-Torres challenges this assumption, calling for a longer historical perspective and a broader horizon of thinking on decolonization than the usual focus on British Imperialism or trajectories that, with their political frameworks of empire and nation-state, privilege the European Enlightenment. Decolonization is at the very least a perspective that requires going back in time to the conquest of the Americas. But Maldonado-Torres is calling for more than that. This shift in historical perspective entails a philosophical shift too: one that opens out the current methods and framing of the concept of decolonization in order to loosen the (still) tight grip of empiricism and narrowly historicist periodization with their third-person flattening effects. The new horizon that is proposed instead opens up a concept of decolonization that includes lived experience understood and reconstituted beyond the philosophical frames and perspectives of the European Enlightenment. To be colonized is not to live in a ‘period’ or era laid down by this trajectory. The colonized live the past in the present as experiences that resist reduction to the Procrustean bed of a European historical period. To live as the colonized is to experience space as well as time phenomenologically from the ground of a particular embodiment; decolonization must therefore be a process that happens not in the frame of Western modernity but enacting a rupture with its modes of governmental reason. It must build its own frameworks of meaning-making and political and ethical intervention from outside the crude binaries of modern and primitive, developed and underdeveloped. As modernity is colonial in its very nature, the goal of decolonization must be one of moving beyond its horizons, ‘beyond modernity’. Decolonization demands a new ontology, a new ethics, a new epistemological framework. Maldonado-Torres concludes his essay by suggesting ten theses addressed to the advancement of a more authentic concept. Above all, decolonization must involve the recognition of the subject as an open site of struggle for a world view, as well as for independence in the narrower political and economic sense. A range of strategies involve adopting and inculcating a ‘decolonial attitude’ – attitude as an orientation of the subject with respect to knowledge, power and being – that recognizes modernity as a metaphysical catastrophe. Decolonization means building a new collective ‘world of you’, a world of love as well as rage, a future worth having. As discourses of climate change, risk, catastrophe and discontinuity present a different kind of horizon, Sarah Atkinson’s essay turns to the concept most widely associated with the ways that humans cope with and accommodate themselves to situations of radical uncertainty, unpredictability and catastrophic threat. She begins by examining the history of the concept of ‘Resilience’ and its metaphorical extension to a variety of contexts – health, governance, economics, well-being – that have gradually shifted away from its original semantic field of engineering (though the popular idea of 32 Future Theory ‘bouncing back’ retains something of the flavour of the original notion of a material that is ‘resilient’ to return to its prior state). Like all such fuzzy concepts – sustainability is another – its semantic origins facilitate tropic extension, boundary crossing and scalar movement. ‘Resilience’ became Time magazine’s buzzword of the year in 2013 as the concept of the ‘Tipping Point’ began to go viral and the newest sciences of complexity were revealing more and more the unpredictable, stochastic and indeterminable nature of many of the contemporary threats to the planet and to personal futures. The essay focuses specifically on ways in which discourses and practices around public and personal health and well-being have drawn increasingly on such constructions of ‘resilience’ in the last decade. The interest in how people cope with adversity and threats to flourishing, or with chronic conditions, for example, began in the 1970s, though they were not addressed until more recently by traditional predictive models of disease employed by epidemiologists or diagnostic medicine. In the 1970s, the ‘positive psychology’ movement, built on the initial work of Martin Seligman, capitalized on this gap between felt experience and scientific calibration. Atkinson traces how, as this movement becomes an extension of Big Pharma, therapeutic discourses around resilience are increasingly entangled with neoliberal assumptions concerning selfcare and perpetual self-management. Although the concept is now a key driver of the contemporary (multi-billion) self-help industry, its current fashioning and therapeutic deployment is mostly unresponsive to and disconnected from any politics of fragility, precarity or vulnerability and the glaring evidence of the debilitating effects of economic and political regimes that, worldwide, bear devastatingly on people’s lives. As with Samuel Smiles’s Victorian liberal concept of ‘Self Help’, the new ‘resilience’ is fully at home in neoliberal times. Derek Attridge reminds us that ‘Hospitality’ is an ancient concept that might be traced back to Homer but is still as important in the present as it once was for the Ancient Greeks. Hospitality is a key issue for our time in numerous domains for it is the question of whom we admit and on what terms. The asylum seeker? The refugee? The undocumented immigrant? It raises the question of what we think of as home or mean by homeland or belonging. Like the gift, hospitality is nothing, however, without risk – nothing unless there is no expectation of reciprocity (a riposte indeed for evolutionary game theories with their mercenary or biologistic constructions of altruism). Like the event, hospitality engages the unexpected, arrival and arrivants. The key philosophers of hospitality in our own time are Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In both, welcoming is an ethical act. But for Attridge, it is Derrida above all, who helps to clarify how hospitality, as a welcoming to the infinite and the unconditional, cannot simply be opposed to hospitality as a conditional in the ethical realm of the intersubjective and the everyday; this would be to treat them dualistically rather than as entangled qualities of the broader concept. His essay goes on to trace the complex and interdependent nature of the relation between conditionality and unconditionality in Derrida’s engagement with Levinas’s idea of the ethical as an unconditional opening to the singular other. He cautions, however, that even as Derrida shows how the unconditional cannot be thought without the conditional, neither is its function interchangeable with the Kantian concept of a regulative ideal. Instead Attridge demonstrates how Derrida’s broader writing transposes this duality onto other domains such as justice and the Introduction 33 law (for the law as an unconditional requires actual laws in order to be more than abstract utopianism). Whereas an invitation welcomes in the other, but conditionally, and on the terms of the host, the unconditional visitation carries the risk that the host be taken hostage. If the other is unknown, not even in species terms – unexpected, unpredictable – then hospitality must be inventive too if it is to respond to the specific kinds of care required by the other. As in the space of the poetic where language reinvents itself, hospitality is an encounter with the singular other, an interruption finally of and by the other in oneself. Attridge ends by suggesting how the question of hospitality raises awareness of two versions of human life: the one, material, calibrated, seeking the predictable; the other, unpredictable, risk-taking, open to the future. As demonstrated in so many other essays too, their relation is never one of simple duality. It is this unpredictable relation to the future that defines ‘Risk’ at its simplest, Marc Botha claims. At once universal and particular, risk crosses physical, cultural and historical boundaries, always taking new forms in the process. In exploring these forms, Botha draws on a wide range of thinkers whose works span over three decades, from the pioneering work of Ulrich Beck on the risk society, to the more recent interventions in the biopolitics of vulnerability by Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe. That risk remains significant to the present is evident from the profound tension that has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic which, Botha notes, exposes a clear rift in risk thinking between the abstract understanding of risk as an economic calculation of probability on one hand, and, on the other, a visceral conception of risk as a phenomenon that is located, in the first instance, in the body of the vulnerable subject or the subject at risk. In exposing this tension between abstraction and viscerality, it becomes clear that risk presents a pervasive ideological battlefield on which the value of human life (that is, the lives of visceral, embodied beings) is set in opposition to the value of economic markets. Since risk is radical not only to life itself, but to every conception of the future, Botha suggests that it is only by undermining the connection between risk and economic value, and rather interrogating how risk grounds the more radical value of all human life, that it becomes possible to formulate what it means to take the right risks. To engage critically, in this sense, with risk and its cognates – vulnerability, fragility and precariousness among them – requires, in the first instance, to rethink the ways in which we represent risk. Risk, upon closer inspection, resists direct representation, appealing instead to the overwhelming sense of presence associated with an aesthetics of the sublime. To probe this claim, Botha turns to the work of poet, Rob Halpern, and in particular two recent collections, Music for Porn (2012) and Common Place (2015), which offer an exemplary vehicle for thinking through risk. Both collections centre on a deeply critical interrogation of US military and economic imperialism and, in particular, the inextricability of the post-9/11 state of exception and a contemporary global capitalist world order dominated by the United States. This world order adopts as its avatar a very specific constellation of qualities aggregated into a recognizable abstraction, the neoliberal subject: a subject that is politically docile, enslaved to various commodity markets and made responsible for its own welfare in a system designed to exploit rather than nurture. The neoliberal subject, therefore, becomes 34 Future Theory the subject par excellence, as both contemporary risk thinking and neoliberalism are strategically constituted through a process of abstraction. In contrast, Botha holds, by insisting on the sheer radicality of fragility, vulnerability and risk to the lived experience of the subject, Halpern’s work draws us back to a visceral understanding of the embodied subject at risk which counteracts risk’s abstraction. The visceral subject of Music for Porn, the vulnerable body of the US solider, becomes a highly charged vehicle capable of disturbing ideological complacencies precisely to the extent that it also becomes an uncanny object of the queer gaze. In Common Place, Halpern continues this exploration of the abjected body at risk by turning to the figure of the post-9/11 political detainee (in Guantanamo Bay) – an individual who has not only been utterly deprived of fundamental human rights, but also placed entirely outside of what Judith Butler recognizes as any economy of grievability and, Botha argues, its corollary, desirability. For the right to be grieved and the right to be desired constitute visceral expressions of the right to be loved, Botha suggests. In this light, the radical nature of Halpern’s strategy comes fully into view: to problematize the struggle in contemporary biopolitics, between the viscerality of the body at risk and the capacity of contemporary societies to abstract such bodies to some kind of purely informational or algorithmic form. How then to redeem the visceral body from total abstraction? Botha suggests that Halpern seeks a tentative answer to this question through something we might call an erotic thanatography – the injection through language and writing of a queer desire into a situation where all desirability has been suppressed or even erased – which aims, in effect, to write life back into necropolitical narratives that frame bodily and social death in the contemporary state of exception. Drawing sustained attention to how these queered figures disrupt our blind acquiescence in current configurations of power, it becomes possible to see how both the body and the body politic can be opened and reopened through a radical re-examination of vulnerability and risk, seen not simply in terms of the need to manage or govern risk, threat and insecurity, but as a necessary condition for the future itself. In the context of everything that has been written so far in this volume, to conclude with the concept of ‘Hope’ might seem to strike a falsely upbeat note, a capitulation to some impulse of conscience prompting the feeling that to end otherwise – without, at least, a gesture of optimism – might be a betrayal of our professional duty as editors. As Caroline Edwards reminds us in her essay, optimism doesn’t require hope: in a world that seems evidently thin on expressions of communal joy, the search for signs of hope is also a sign that optimism, rather than its cheery cousin fatalism, is in short supply. But even to think about the concept of hope, like the Left melancholy analysed by Traverso where we began, reminds us that the political life is an affective one. That said, hope is not necessarily an uncomplicatedly joyous emotion: like anxiety and fear, it is an anticipatory emotion; its relation to time is complex. But Edwards finds signs of hope in the midst of gloom. Her essay opens with an account of the Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, an act of civic disruption quickly reiterated across 1,500 cities worldwide, a howl of rage against the effects of a decade of neoliberal austerity. Since then, of course, numerous political commentators have criticized Occupy as a mode of horizontalist politics whose effects were always bound to be transient, never Introduction 35 penetrating into financial and political institutions so that deeper or more permanent change might have been affected. But for Edwards, Occupy got something right and it captured a change in mood, close to what Raymond Williams has described as an emergent ‘structure of feeling’.26 One might add that there are now further signs that the long reign of neoliberal hegemony may at last be starting to break up as rightwing populist governments are being forced to retreat from reductionist ideologies of markets and policies of extreme austerity. For Edwards, other signs abound too, in slut walks, trans-activism, the many new collectives around race, environment, sexuality, Green politics: all voicing protest in varieties of boisterous profanity akin to what Ernst Bloch referred to as ‘holiday’. The essay strikes a sympathetic note in this respect, foregrounding the work of Ernst Bloch, the most overlooked of Western Marxists, the one who – drawing on rich traditions of Jewish Messianism, phenomenology, Expressionism and classicism – had most to say about utopia and hope, about how the dream of a non-alienated life might be translated into action. Bloch is the philosopher of hope and, Edwards suggests, his time has come again. She reads Bloch in the context of post-secularism, within an understanding of temporality where the ‘not yet’ is already an ontological component of experience in the present, an affective condition hovering between absence and presence. Her essay sits interestingly alongside Andrew Gibson’s reflections on remainder, though their moods are very different. Reconceptualizing Jewish Messianism within such a materialist frame, Bloch can be seen too as a philosopher of catastrophe (to despair is to give up hope, whereas the structure of the catastrophic is the anticipation of a final turn), though again the mood of Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay on catastrophe is closer to Gibson’s – a reminder that concepts carry multiple possibilities of affective association. Bloch’s concept of ‘the leap’, the flash of recognition in the present of that which is to come, as in mystical experiences of the Parousia, is a kind of event that draws on religious traditions that still have much to teach us about cultivating attention to what slips through the cracks of habitual seeing. Edwards reflects by way of conclusion that utopia too might be hiding, even now, between these very cracks. It may even be hiding between the words that make up this volume. That would be convenient for us: for though we decided to begin with the past, melancholy and memory, we had always desired, somehow, to end this journey through the landscape of contemporary theory with hope and the future – as more than the imagination of disaster. Notes 1 2 3 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker and Warburg, 1976), 773. See in particular, George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, originally published in Horizon in 1946; reissued as Politics and the English Language (London: Penguin, 2013). Quine rejected the analytic/synthetic distinction in philosophy, arguing that conceptual schemes are tools for prediction in the light of past experience and that, although things exist, they enter our conceptions only as cultural posits within webs 36 4 5 6 7 8 Future Theory of belief: the key text is ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, The Philosophical Review 60 (1952): 20–43. Deleuze derives this idea in part from Henri Bergson’s critique of abstract concepts as too general; instead Deleuze posits the idea of a multiplicity as a perpetual heterogeneity of concepts produced from within a system where virtual ideas and intensive dramas form an interplay producing concepts out of perpetual difference and repetition. These ideas run through much of his work but see especially, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991) and A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). There is a huge literature on each of these themes but particularly helpful recent accounts include Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2015); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Philip Mirowski, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Jan Werner-Muller, What Is Populism? (London: Penguin, 2016); Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018); Alain Badiou et al., What Is a People? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliott (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (New York: Columbia, 2016); Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, eds., Critique and Post-Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt, A Time for Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon Press, 1964). See Patricia Waugh, ‘Futures for English Studies: English at the Tipping Point and Styles of Thinking in the Twenty-first Century’, in Futures for English, ed. Ann Hewings, Lynda Prescott and Philp Seargeant (London and New York: Palgrave, 2016), 19–39. The essay is a reflection – from the perspective of our own discipline and its styles of thinking – on ways in which literary thinking, despite the limitation of its scale of operation can provide a kind of cognitive workout for understanding, without knowledge of the precise mathematics of systems modelling, how complex dynamic systems operate. One of the problems in grasping climate change or the effects of austerity economics and neoliberal financial systems is an adherence in everyday but also in intellectual argument to thinking in linear and mostly gradualist terms. There is also widespread ignorance of and resistance to acknowledging and recognizing the complex mechanisms involved in downward causation and those of positive forcing at the heart of catastrophic change in complex systems. The humanities need to think more about how their own resources might contribute to shifting these entrenched styles. The shift from structure to system, genetics to postgenomics, dialectics to entanglement, and more generally towards complexity, emergence, networks and interconnectedness, begins tentatively in the 1990s, particularly in the return of more dialectical and complex evolutionary developmental biological theories that displace selfish gene thinking. But there is a marked surge of publications in this area across numerous disciplines appearing from 2005 onwards. Many of these reflect the turn to systems or ecosystems thinking or the rise of the new materialisms, posthumanisms, the digital humanities, theories of extended and embodied mind and distributed cognition. There are too many to mention here, but influential texts published between 2000 and 2010 and relevant to many of the Introduction 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 37 essays in this volume include Stuart Kauffman’s development of complexity within the biological sciences, Investigations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb’s Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioural and Symbolic Variations in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005) calling for an end to biological reductionism and genetic determinism; Philip Clayton and Paul Davies, The ReEmergence of Emergence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Alan Lui, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge, Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2004) on the new networked and digital worlds of work; Bruno Latour (his Clarendon lectures), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London and New York: Continuum, 2006); Mary Chayko, Portable Communities: The Social Dynamics of Online and Mobile Communities (New York: Suny, 2008) and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke, 2010). Andy Clark and David Chalmer’s hugely influential paper ‘The Extended Mind’ was published in 1998 in Analysis 58, 1 (Jan, 1998): 7–19 as well as Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension in 2008 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), whose account of ‘agential realism’ as ‘intra-action’ rereads the quantum physics account of indeterminism and uncertainty as a mode of entanglement within a framework of ontological emergence; Barad builds on earlier feminist science studies, particularly the important pioneering work of Evelyn Fox Keller that straddles physics, biology and epistemology. Endel Tulving’s seminal idea of episodic memory appeared in ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’, Organisation of Memory 1 (1972): 381–403. See also his book, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press). See John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) for a critique of naturalistic thinking that leads to sociobiology and reductionist evolutionary psychology, especially his entertaining account of the microbe’s view of the world as a friendly germ meeting a selfish gene. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) is associated with this argument but it is a remarkably persistent one, eventually entangled with evolutionary thought as current theories in favour of deregulation of markets tend to suggest. See Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (London: Penguin, 1994), Stephen Pinker, The Blank Slate; The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2003) and also Paul Krugman’s The Self-Organising Economy (London: Blackwell, 1996), one of the first to develop the concept of self-organization from biologists such as Maturana and Varela as a means of updating invisible hand thinking in economics. Gibson’s ‘Badiou and Beckett: Actual Infinity, Event, Remainder’, Polygraph 17 (2005): 175–203, lays out the relation between event and remainder. Alain Ehrenberg’s Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill: Queen’s University Press, 2009) is a powerful and thoughtful account of how neoliberal performance culture’s constant raising of the bar for markers of ‘success’, and its infatuation with growth, induces a state of perpetual acceleration that is unsustainable in both personal and global terms. 38 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Future Theory Wallerstein’s work draws heavily on dependency theory, the work of Fanon and on Marxism, but he also acknowledges a huge debt to the chemist Ilya Prigogine and to complex dynamic systems theory in several places. See, for example, the introductory essay written by Wallerstein in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000). This essay recounts a sense of revelation on first hearing Prigogine deliver a lecture and in recognizing the affinities with his own thinking. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose [1925] (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993). Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) was crucial in first analysing the structure of narrative in such terms, drawing substantially on Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of As If that had been translated by C. K. Ogden in 1921. It was Peter Brook’s Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) that developed Kermode’s ideas, suggesting that plot functions as ‘an anticipation of a retrospection’. For a more developed argument along these lines, see Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 25–48. For a cogent and impassioned defence of old materialisms, including historical materialism, against the new forms of vibrant matter and Latourian distributed agency, see Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018). Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 206. For an original and challenging alternative that suggests an entire reorganization of both political and knowledge economies, see the Brazilian political philosopher Roberto Unger’s The Knowledge Economy (London: Verso, 2019). Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos examine the effects of neoliberalism on the contemporary university. For a more recent wide-ranging collection of essays developing many of Brown’s insights, see Debaditya Bhattacharya, ed., The Idea of the University (New York: Routledge, 2019). Raymond Williams’s phrase was first used in The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) and continues to resonate through his later work, especially in Marxism and Literature where it is attached explicitly to the concept of emergence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).