Impossible Future Research Articles

Prosthetic Gods, Projected Monsters

This paper examines several narratives of techno-horror in literature and film. Special attention is paid to the recurring trope of monstrosity arising from a technologically augmented sense of sight. Utilizing a psychoanalytically informed analysis, this paper argues that fictions can express latent, untenable dimensions of very real experiences. In the case of techno-horror, narratives of sight, imagination, and projection-made-monstrous are rooted in contemporary relationships with technology and its capacity for depicting and transmitting unconscious fantasies. In this relationship, the technological is the extension of a tangible category of humanity, while nevertheless containing the fear that this extension dissolves its stability. Thus, the genre of techno-horror is unique in expressing the role of unconscious fantasies – our unattainable ideals for becoming “prosthetic Gods,” as Freud put it (1930) – in our relationship with technology. Like the ideal of transcendence in religion, this technological ideal is a desire for both an impossible future, as well as the wish to return to an equally impossible, infantile past. Ultimately, this paper suggests that techno-horror narratives are expressions of a failure in taking responsibility for the othered unconscious fantasies that motivate our relationship with technology. Understanding these narratives within the context of psychoanalytic projection and situating them within the long tradition of imagining a transcendence of the human subject affords a better understanding of the cultural work accomplished by these contemporary expressions of the human-made-monstrous.

Utopian Rhetoric Has a Pleasure Problem

ABSTRACT By tracing rhetorical arcs of time, political leaders paint a promised future. Leaders whose interests lie in a status-quo-future use process-frames, such as cycles or progress. But leaders who promise a radically new future may use a utopian stasis-frame, such as eschatology. They promise an ultimate arrival, an eschaton. Arrival means no more need of violence and domination. This is Utopia’s promise. But for Utopia to last, to remain still and stable at this destination, change-driving conflict must cease. Without recourse to violence and domination to manage conflict, utopians must prevent it from arising in the first place. To do this, it is necessary to control conflict’s driving source: desire and pleasure. Utopia thus confronts a pleasure problem. This problem—I argue through a typology of pleasures—it cannot resolve. The pleasure problem means the same rhetoric of final arrival—which sparks energetic political activity in the present—renders Utopia an impossible future.

The unheeded present and the impossible future: temporalities of relocation after Typhoon Haiyan

ABSTRACTRecovery plans were developed for both the Philippines and Tacloban City in particular. They framed Haiyan as a climate change emergency, and sought to respond to future risks to the city and country. This focus on future recovery came at the expense of attention to the transitional needs of those worst affected by the Typhoon. International humanitarian organizations were co-opted into the government’s refusal of transitional assistance to Tacloban City shoreline residents. This was because they construed their mandate of apolitical assistance in a particular way. An alternative framing of emergency deployed by a local organization produced a very different result. In order to respond to the range of temporal needs in post-disaster situations, humanitarian actors need to be cognizant of the range of epistemic frameworks available to them.

The Unheeded Present and the Impossible Future: Temporalities of Relocation after Typhoon Haiyan

Recovery plans were developed for both the Philippines and Tacloban City in particular. They framed Haiyan as a climate change emergency and sought to respond to future risks to the city and country. This focus on future recovery came at the expense of attention to the transitional needs of those worst affected by the Typhoon. International humanitarian organizations were co-opted into the government’s refusal of transitional assistance to Tacloban City shoreline residents. This was because they construed their mandate of apolitical assistance in a particular way. An alternative framing of emergency deployed by a local organisation produced a very different result. In order to respond to the range of temporal needs in post-disaster situations, humanitarian actors need to be cognizant of the range of epistemic frameworks available to them.

Affirmations of Flesh: Toni Morrison's Gaze into the Human

Affirmations of FleshToni Morrison's Gaze into the Human Mina Karavanta (bio) I prefer to think of a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as something other than a theme park, or a failed and always-failing dream or as the father's house of many rooms. I am thinking of it as home. "Home" seems a suitable term because, first, it lets me make a radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home and helps me clarify my thoughts on racial construction. Second, the term domesticates the racial project, moves the job of unmattering race away from pathetic yearning and futile desire; away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably nonexistent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity. Third, because eliminating the potency of racist constructs in language is the work I can do. I can't wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work. —Toni Morrison, "Home" Toni Morrison's writing sculpts a politics of home from the ruins of the house of race so as to rewrite the history of the human against the language and practices of racism that racialize subjects and commodify their ontological and psychic complexity. By attending to the "interior life" of those who were marginalized during and after slavery throughout colonial modernity, Morrison transforms the idea of the human that race thinking and racism have consolidated in modernity, namely, the idea of a being who can be reduced to the organizing table of race (Morrison, "The Site of Memory" 70). She thus attends to a larger project, which is a decentering of the representation of the world modelled on a certain idea of Man that has colonized Being to "a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter" and is the product of a "manageable, doable, modern human activity" ("Home" 3). This work requires the systematic and persistent deconstruction of "racist constructs in language" that continue to haunt the language of the nation and its community politics while drawing upon a blood narrative of fraternity ties that have expelled the being of the humans who remain unanswerable to the overrepresented "Christian Man" (Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality" 303).1 Morrison dismantles the house of race to build the home of the human while reinventing language against the effects and traces of race thinking.2 Without losing sight of the specificity of the history and politics of the African American subject and community as a history and politics in the world and of the world, she develops a poetics of the human made of the fragments and ruins of the multiple histories of the dispossessed. Slaves, orphans, emancipated but not liberated subjects, expropriated and poor people, [End Page 201] indentured laborers, runaway people, and migrant women and men are the "genres of being human" who people her texts, the humanity Morrison's oeuvre represents (Wynter and McKittrick 31). Attending to such humanity made to the measure of expropriated humans, many still struggling to be recognized as human,3 Morrison's writing is invested in disclosing how the life of black subjects has been ontologically, intellectually, psychically complex. At the same time, she illustrates how such lives remain capable of imagining and creating both individual and communal living drawn on affective relations, despite the biopolitical violence to which this individual and communal life has been subjected.4 By reading Morrison's Paradise as a neo-slave narrative that deconstructs race thinking and its community politics, I propose to demonstrate how Morrison's text engenders a poetics of community and the human attentive to the making of a worldly rather than nationalist and exceptionalist polity against and beyond race thinking. This polity, symbolically represented by the decentering figure of the specter, signifies, importantly, the dispossessed and expropriated humans, and the politics of flesh as a politics that reveals and undoes the construction of the subject made to the measure of Man. Specter and flesh, the concepts through which Morrison performs the "unmattering" of "race" throughout her work are especially evident in Paradise. Moreover, the "unmattering race" contributes to a reinvention of the world as the larger polity that Morrison has in mind...

Brokeback Mountain and Reproductive Futurism

리 에델만의 “재생산적 미래주의”에 대한 비판을 원용하며, 이 논문은 이안의 <브로크백 마운틴>이 이성애규범적인 가치와 폭력을 어떻게 조명하는가를 살펴본다. 자신의 2005년 저서 『미래는 없다: 퀴어이론과 죽음욕동』에서 에델만은 이성애규범성의 특권적 위치가 “재생산적 미래주의”에 의해 보존되고 있음을 밝힌다. 그에 따르면, “재생산적 미래주의”는 비생산적인 쾌락의 유예를 요구할 뿐 아니라, 주체와 존재가 합일을 이루는 불가능한 미래를 위해 현재의 희생을 끊임없이 요구한다. “재생산적인 미래주의”의 대척점에 “퀴어다움”을 위치시키는 에델만은, “퀴어다움”이 지배적인 담론과 제도가 요구하는 강제적인 이성애적 섹슈얼리티와 재생산을 거부한다는 점에서 윤리적인 가치를 지님을 천명한다. 이 글에서는 <브로크백 마운틴>이 그 같은 이성애 규범적이고 동성애 혐오적인 담론들과 어떻게 협상하고 타협하는지를 규명한다. 또한, 이 논문은 <브로크백 마운틴>이 1980-90년대 미국사회에서 발생한 에이즈의 위기 속에서 퀴어 주체들이 겪은 트라우마와 그들의 대응을 재현하고 있음을 시사한다. 마지막으로는 프로이드의 멜랑콜리아 개념을 이용하여, 영화의 마지막 장면을 자세히 분석함으로써, 퀴어주체가 과거와 맺는 윤리적 관계의 양상에 대해 살펴본다.Building on Lee Edelman’s critique of what he calls “reproductive futurism,” this essay investigates how Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) bears and interrogates the traces of heteronormative values and violence. In his searing book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman argues that the absolute privilege of heteronormativity is preserved by “reproductive futurism,” which not only demands the deferment of non-(re)productive pleasures but also the brutal sacrifice of the present for the impossible future in which the subject’s alienation would fade away into the seamlessness of identity. Presenting queerness as antithetical to the “reproductive futurism,” Edelman asserts that queerness achieves its ethical value in that it refuses the heteronormative mandate by which our dominant culture and institutions demand compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction. The present study examines Brokeback Mountain as a cultural site in which such heteronormative and homophobic discourses can be questioned or endorsed. I also argue that the discussion of AIDS is central to the film, which symbolizes the traumatic experiences of queers amid the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. In doing so, this discussion suggests that Brokeback Mountain shows how a melancholic queer subject establishes an ethical relationship to the past that refuses the mandate of reproductive futurism embodied in the figure of progressive future.

“Ravel Out Into Time”: Phenomenology and Temporality in As I Lay Dying

ZACHARY TAVLIN University of Washington “Ravel Out Into Time”: Phenomenology and Temporality in As I Lay Dying THE PROLIFERATION OF TEMPORAL EXPERIMENTATION IN THE LITERATURE of the modernist period, as extensive as it was, cannot be contained within the media of poetry and prose. Accompanying high modernist literature in this regard were revolutionary attempts at temporalizing traditionally spatial forms in the plastic arts—cubist painting was one style that allowed the spatial properties of its objects, still lives in principle, to synchronize according to a temporal progression. Coupled with the cubist breakthrough historically was the novelty of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reductions, which included a theory of time-consciousness that many critics have found remarkably similar to the temporal insights contained in cubist rearrangements on canvas.1 In both cases, so the story goes, time for the transcendental subject is not an atomized series of moments, but a deeply structural experience of a present that’s extended into both the (rather immediate) past and future—operations that Husserl called “protention” and “retention.” But Husserl provides merely one way of representing inner time-consciousness aesthetically. If space is temporal, time is spatial, and I will argue that, despite a small industry of literary critics engaging in a running debate on the cubism inherent in the novel, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying conceives of a time whose function is one of confrontation with and contamination of the phenomenological structure of time-consciousness and its presupposed relation to space. 1 This case has been made thoroughly outside of the circle of literary critics I am dealing with here, and indeed outside of literary criticism (and even art criticism) in general. For example, Slavoj Žižek has opposed the structure of existential and political acts to visual arts that produce “a temporality irreducible to space”: “What is cubism in painting . . . where the object is depicted simultaneously from different points of view, if not an attempt to translate the temporal succession of the gaze circulating around the object into spatial coexistence of different perspectives within the synchronous unity of a picture?” (64). Žižek’s non-intuitive, throwaway appeal to this structure of cubist composition demonstrates, if nothing else, the sense in which this sort of claim has been taken for granted. 84 Zachary Tavlin Several commentators have reductively linked protentional and retentionaloperationstotheformalcompositionalstrategiesofthecubist painters. While the novel’s characterization, formal structure, and imagery are deeply related to temporal experimentation in the visual arts, I will claim that its relation to phenomenological theories typically associated with movements like cubism is an ambivalent one. While Faulkner’s text marks a radical break from pre-cubistic forms of perception, the spatial progress of the narrative engages with the past and the impossible future of death, the latter a form of non-being that is structured not according to a self-present temporality but by an event that is always to come. Looking at Martin Heidegger’s theory of time and its complication of Husserlian time-consciousness, where at the level of gear (like Cash’s tools, Jewel’s horse, even Vardaman’s fish) objects are not primarily encountered in a series of one-sided perspectives and within an extended present, I hope to locate a productive temporalspatial relationship in Faulkner where the unity of space and time is topologically complex, regional, and not reducibly “object-ive.” By articulating the value of Heidegger’s concepts for a reading of the novel, I will make a case for moving away from the cubistic reading, which ultimately serves as a stand-in, on the subject of space and time, for a Husserlian hermeneutic. Husserl’s Coffin Husserl’sinnertime-consciousnessreliesupontwophenomenological operations that, together, extend (or impregnate) the subject’s present experience. Retention is the immediate gathering into the present of what was perceived directly prior to the particular intentional act, and protention is the immediate anticipation of what will be perceived directly posterior to the act. For the subject, these structures do not suggest a constant association between perception and a related memory or premonition, insofar as those terms suggest a hermeneutically constitutive distance between the immediate perception itself and the feature of past or present perception. When an object...

An impossible future: John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace'

John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' narrates a world in which revolutionary politics are assumed to be immanent in the machines that structure and enable networked communication. Attention to the rhetorical strategies of the piece reveals a wealth of contradictions and misdirection: newness is rooted in history; revolution is effected by commercial transaction; and liberal democracy becomes libertarianism. The ways in which the Declaration establishes and resolves narrative conflict promote an 'impossible future' that is blind both to the history of the underlying technologies and to the American revolutionary politics on which it claims to base itself. Barlow's project would have been served better by a more pragmatic intervention into real-world processes.Ten years after its original publication, the Declaration is both widely reprinted and increasingly mocked: its language has become commonplace and its idealism has come to seem absurd.

The Echo of an Impossible Future in The Literary Absolute

In The Literary Absolute, the authors narrowly define German Romanticism as Friedrich Schlegel's (et al's) Athenaeum Fragments, arguing that the Jena circle worked in this sensible, intuitional genre to complete the Kantian subject in a Darstellung of the subject's freedom. In the event, however, they encountered the free force of existence that radically unworked the very Work they strove to complete and left them speechless before the Ereignis they inaugurated. This book would repeat Romanticism, this time setting a proper measure on the experience of freedom: "d�s�vrement," Blanchot's interminable interruption that threatens Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's entire program with utter ruin.

SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION… SUGGESTIONS FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

Educational TheoryVolume 48, Issue 4 p. 499-510 SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION… SUGGESTIONS FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE FUTURE OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Gert J.J. Biesta, Gert J.J. Biesta Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at Utrecht University, PO BOX 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands. His primary areas of scholarship are pragmatism, postmodernism, critical pedagogy, and philosophy and methodology of the social sciences.Search for more papers by this author Gert J.J. Biesta, Gert J.J. Biesta Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at Utrecht University, PO BOX 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands. His primary areas of scholarship are pragmatism, postmodernism, critical pedagogy, and philosophy and methodology of the social sciences.Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 January 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00499.xCitations: 87Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume48, Issue4December 1998Pages 499-510 RelatedInformation