“Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order under capitalism from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today’s Wall Street Consensus.
Here is 2h of the most intense and informative talk I got to listen to recently. I totally recommend both of them to follow in TW/X – if you are still on that platform. We had some previous posts on economy and political economy and inflation, but this one is truly essential for everyone interested in how global financial institutions came to exist and how the dollarisation of the world after WWII came to dominate our lives. It is also a very good introduction into two important theories that have lost the battle in the market of ideas – but are increasingly resuscitated in order to make sense of the rising unequal exchanges, dependencies, and monetary imperialisms that structure the Global North/Global South axis in capitalism: Dependency theory and World-systems theory. What is important is that both of them (one from Eastern Europe and the other from Equatorial Africa) advocate for a new global economic system where the Global South is at its center (the so-called “Bandung Woods” named after the Afro-Asian or Asian-African Bandung Conference in 1955 Bandung, Indonesia) to replace the Washington (or now Wall Street) Consensus.
Most of what I am saying here tries to approximate what the two eminent (imho opinion) macroeconomists and monetary sovereignty experts spell out. I am going to quote in full Gabriela Gabor (who happens to be a Romanian born) from the written version of the interview (available here).
DANIELA GABOR:
The Washington Consensus is in a sense a marker of who makes the rules in the global economic system, and that was Washington. Its intellectual father was John Williamson. He was quite reluctant to recognize himself as an intellectual father, because very quickly, the Washington Consensus was dubbed as a neoliberal consensus. I think it’s best described as a holy trinity of economic policies that were prescribed to countries, particularly in Latin America. This was a “what’s-happening-in-our-backyard” type of arrangement for the United States.
The three pillars of the Washington Consensus were economic stabilization, privatization, and liberalization [my emphasis). Economic stabilization basically meant the central banks have to target inflation and to keep prices stable; privatization meant trying to reduce the footprint of the developmental state in the economy by preventing the state from allocating capital or getting involved in production through state-owned companies or enterprises; and liberalization of international trade meant removing trade barriers, but also liberalization of prices domestically by not using price controls and removing subsidies as much as possible.
This is interpreted as an attempt to change the balance between the state and the market. Of course the states vs. markets framework is a crude description because the state had to construct certain markets. But it is true that the Washington Consensus was a policy paradigm and a political project to kill off the developmental state. In the 1950s and ’60s, the developmental state, under what we describe now as heterodox economic ideas, attempted to design a national development strategy in a context of deteriorating terms of trade.
For developing nations, the question was, how do we make sure that we will get paid better for our exports than what we have to pay for our inputs? That typically meant industrial upgrading. That typically meant having a good industrial policy. It typically meant having some form of financial repression, which subordinated the domestic banking system to the needs of the industrial policy. It meant some form of a social contract with domestic capital and also with foreign capital, but mostly domestic capital, to make sure that domestic capital worked together with the state for industrial policy purposes.
The Washington Consensus is basically a political project to dismantle this developmental state and instead to bring in the market as the mechanism to allocate resources. The state doesn’t disappear of course. But what we know is that the state that is useful for citizens in a sense disappears because you have an increasing removal of the state from the provision of public goods, one way or another, under the idea that the market can do things better than the state.
In the postwar era, you have the Bretton Woods institutions that are pushing this Washington Consensus all over the world. Wherever the IMF or the World Bank go, they leave a trail of structural adjustment programs. You have the IMF pushing for stability and particular forms of monetary and fiscal austerity under the Washington Consensus. There is an increasing recognition toward the end of the 1990s that this has meant a lost decade for Latin American countries, that it produced a lot of poverty across African countries that were forced to adopt them. Of course there are certain domestic political constituencies that preferred the Washington Consensus rules simply because they align well with the aims of right-wing politics.
By the early 2000s, Bretton Woods institutions become a bit more unwilling to promote the more radical elements of the Washington Consensus. This leads to what is called now the Post–Washington Consensus, which is a recognition that there are market failures. The idea is that if there are market failures, then of course the state is necessary. So you don’t have the resurrection of the developmental state, but you have the resurrection of the state as a regulator that tries to correct market failures but doesn’t allocate capital or doesn’t interfere with market signals. It corrects the signals if those have gone wrong one way or another.
In some ways we still have that now, because all discussions about carbon prices, for example, have to do with how to achieve the low-carbon transition; they rest on the idea that the state doesn’t need to do a lot more than just correct the failure of the market to price the climate crisis.
I am from the generation whose parents suffered the consequences of the IMF and World Bank austerity policies. You could see concrete impacts because many people were fired from their jobs, for example, because one of the ways to implement these structural adjustment policies was for the state to clean up its own budget. That means limiting its spending, and one way to limit the spending is to cut health expenditures and education expenditures and also to get rid of some civil servants.
Reduced state budgets also meant less investment and less open-door immigration policies. That has been the impact. That’s why if you look at the development trajectory of Africa and compare that to Asia, you would see that the most significant difference came after the 1980s. This is because Asian countries were not subject to IMF and World Bank policies in the 1980s and 2000s.
Some countries, for example, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Niger — their real GDP per capita in, say, 2015 was lower than their best level of real GDP per capita before implementing the IMF and World Bank’s policies.
That’s a clear indicator of the failure of these kinds of policies. But their primary aim was to prevent the emergence of the developmental state. There are many things people say about Africa, but the first two decades were developmental decades, despite all the shortcomings and despite the many proxy wars. But the leaders were really committed to creating some development, and you can see that in the work by the African economist Thandika Mkandawire.
he Wall Street Consensus (WSC) is an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around selling development finance to the market. The Billions to Trillions agenda, the World Bank ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ or the G20 ‘Infrastructure as an Asset Class’ all call on international development institutions and governments of poor countries to ‘escort capital’ – the trillions of institutional investors – into ‘investable development bonds’, preferably in local currency. For this, the 10 WSC commandments aim to simultaneously reorganize local financial systems around bond market-based finance and forge the de-risking state. The state derisks bond finance for institutional investors by extending guarantees and subsidies to cover (i) demand risks attached to user-fees for (PPP) infrastructure, (ii) political risk attached to policies such as nationalization, higher minimum wages and climate regulation, (iii) climate risks that may become part of regulatory frameworks as material credit risks and (iv) bond market (liquidity) risks that complicate foreign investors’ exit from development assets. The WSC narrows the scope for a green developmental state that could design a just transition to low- carbon economies.
“Adam and Will are joined by Professor Steven Shaviro to discuss his work on the philosophy of science fiction, developing on themes from recent texts such as Extreme Fabulations and 2016’s Discognition out on Repeater Books. We asked Steven about the various techniques that writers such as Frank Herbert, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and China Mieville to unearth possible futures in the present; and how they extrapolate from, speculate upon, and generate fables about dominant tendencies of our political and technological situation. We also touched upon philosophies of time and narrative such as Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, and Darko Suvin.”
Largely I would say Aris K. A. takes a wide look at how the speculative – as a vacuous category mostly understood as and defined by today’s encroaching financial markets. Here’s my first point of contention – why ignore or abandon definitions of how ‘the speculative’ has been reinstated or applied inside philosophical traditions. Before the high abstractions of abstruse financial instruments and even before let’s say the ‘speculative turn’ in recent philosophy, we’ve seen at the start of the 20th c philosophers such AN Whitehead understanding of speculative thinking as playing a vital role in the history and evolution of philosophical trends (see for this Whitehead and Bradley a comparative analysis by Leemon B McHenry 1992). Speculative constructions are what philosophical movements do. During historical periods entire domains of human knowledge get preoccupied & immersed in a feverish activity that results in these expansive theoretical constructions that are being pruned back by analytical rigor & methodological fasting. But then such a strict adherence to methodologies starts being stifling and exhausting and the central issues feel stale and burdensome, so speculation is needed to embolden and rejuvenate this thirst for understanding. At the time, from a minority position of sorts within the philosophical mainstream, Whitehead enlivened this productive relation by building his own metaphysical scheme, in a period when metaphysics fell out of favor with philosophers and was still railing after what some have called the ‘Kantian catastrophe‘. His fresh exercise in speculative thinking acknowledged that philosophical trends came to be dominanted by logical positivism or linguistic analysis: the new orthodoxies of the 20th century. At a time when the speculative in its philosophical sense was lagging behind, speculation was in fact flowering elsewhere, with physics and cosmology picking up on this relay – emboldened by new advances in experimental science, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, as well as evolutionary & organicist thinking in biology, areas that kept revolutionizing our understanding of the universe and surrounding reality.
At rhe same time one needs to somehow give due recognition to how communities and writers of speculative fiction have been using that term to specifically explore the variations and possibilities of an unknown and unpredictable future through their work. Here I am following closely a key text by Steven Shaviro that attempts to trace how speculative fiction and financial speculation interlace yet part ways when it’s about nurturing and multiplying possibilities (in the case of SF) versus just making them operational in the present or trying to actualize them and exhaust every potential (in the case of financial markets). Yes, one can subsequently attribute this current opening towards the speculative – as signaling a growing disposition towards and awareness of the ‘great outdoors’, of the ‘- exo’ everything or even growing larger participation than ever in fictioning as part of the growth of a vibrant SF global community and multiple translations. So it’s good to keep all this on my mind when Aris is talking about the (as yet incomplete) transition from the rational subject implied by most classical bourgeois economics of the so-called Homo economicusthat was supposedly all about individual decisions, equilibrium, optimization and maximizing profits towards what he calls the Homo speculans of today characterized not just by risk-taking or betting on known probabilities (here he makes a distinction between betting and speculation) but somehow on increasing uncertainty, creating havoc while staying afloat when everything that previously seemed imposibile or improbable seems to happen. He is the newly evolved species that even social theory at this moment has not reckoned with. In the face of all the rising algorithmic injustice, in the face of inequality and the inherent insecurities of a financialized world there’s new communities coalescing that he calls speculative communities. And he adopts this in order to stay clear of how ‘mass delusions’ have been been described since the 19th c. Imagination used as a generative – productive capacity is not new its as old at least as the Industrial Revolution or International Labour’s Movement. Aris picks up on Benedict Anderson notion of imaginary communities – the development of ‘nation states’ and nations as invented, co-imagined communities birthed out of the volatility of industrial revolution and the breakdown of old worldview and formation of new ones. I’m also thinking a bit ahead – about working class organizations and even syndicates – that also form in the face of class conflicts and struggles that offered more than wage slavery and uncertain livelihoods. So one should not stop at brokers when thinking about imaginary or speculative communities. On one side this helps perceiving these old/new speculative or imaginary communities aggregating not as irrational mindless crowds but as mutating communities faced with more and more insecurity and uncertainty trying théorie best not to reap luxury benefits but to try and stay afloat among speculative bubbles that they don’t really control. This new Homo speculans is gregarious, swarming and animated by ‘animal spirits’ (in the words of Keynes) and hearsay because it knows how important it is to be more opened (than before) towards the possibility of radical contingency and oriented towards the absolute and completly unpredictable unknown (not just the calculated unknown of probabilities and risk management but one that is completely impossible to anticipate!). In a sense as financial markets kept making our way world more disastrous and prone to unusual outcomes, people have managed navigate dangerous waters, admitting unrecognizable configurations or vernacular practices tonemerge often as forms of counter-speculation. Yet sadly in the Anglo US world its not the Indian farmer revolts but the Anarcapulco crowd who strike one as a thoroughly speculative speculator community.
I at this moment have my own doubts about how much Homo speculans is as open as pretend open or indeed as adaptive if left to live (unaided) amongst the ruins of crumbling infrastructure and disappearing old certainities (and new very clear certainities such as climate change challenges). One big absence from this account is the existence of actual institutions or dirigiste hybrids that are both harnessing these speculative cyclical bubbles and that try to operate at a structural level instituting pockets of certainty, leveraging, changing probabilies and actualizing futures in a more planned and directed way. Here I am thinking about the real semiconductor Asian miracle and leveraging of highly skilled and complex tasks in the chip industry – essential and important to both to current algorithmic capitalism and also a (safe) way to surf the regular tsunamis of this Schumpeterian capitalism. Subsidies are the key here and this is not such a wild bet at all but a careful grooming. I am wondering about spontaneous groups & communities and how this spontaneity is only partial and inversely how the statal buffering against such rampant speculation keeps intervening to save those selfsame markets.
At this more lower spontaneous level, H speculans has also learned something dangerous under dangerous highly volatile times, that he can, under conditions of growing disempowerment & instability still change the odds or try to stay abreast by somehow and more controversially increasing unpredictability. This is how Aris reads these quite worrying & catastrophal political trends of ethno politics & populism in general because he somehow refuses to judge these newly formed conspiracy- swimming communities as purely irrational or just misinformed and lunatic fringe. Aris is a former economist turned sociologist and this already tells us something. Have not read the book – but his argument is surely more complex and I urge you to read the interview. His recourse to the mythical I find a quite problematic but i find his openness to subcultures and conspirative thinking amenable to high weirdness (as defined by Erik Davis). One last thing – I posted this after the podcast on Elon Musk because Aris AK also pics on Musk as an example of typical speculator (Trump and other recent demagogue aren’t also there) – pulling stunts, using memes, switching from one day to the next and fooling around with his own ability to spin tall tales, combine science fact with science fiction, inflame the imagination of his fans and plunge or push up stocks by tw most inconsequential affirmations on his twitter feed. To his credit Aris also recuperate the true origins of speculative financial markets in the 1900 Chicago, the first derivative market of abstract financial instruments in the world, developed initially (if i understood well) as means to hedge farmers against such risks as a bad harvest that they couldn’t control or risks of food products going rotten and nobody wanting to buy them. This is a story worth reading in itself but he goes further than economics or financialization into our daily app practices & tech addictions, our increasingly fluid and volatile love-lives as they grow or result from our increasing usage of dating apps and constant swiping. He considers imagination a guiding faculty to help us wade through the murky waters of speculation (here i have some trouble – stemming from Guy Lardreau’s critique of imagination that lags behind and how fiction jumps ahead of this poverty of imagination).
“Speculative Communities investigates the financial world’s influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.
In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.
For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.”
This is one of the most informative things on the net about the rise of tech billionaires, and specifically E Musk. It is not in any sense meant as promo at a time when he gets way too much attention anyway (we might say he came to dominate TW in the absence of Trump). It is public knowledge that this attention and influence is translated into the rise and the fall of stocks. Somehow this defines the US American entrepreneur from his Chinese counterparts (see Jack Ma). His tweetstorms are at time outrageous, post-ironical affirmations and tend to self-contradict. They are the most egregious examples that another sort of speculation in its financial sense somehow running wild at the center of economies in unpredictable and volatile ways. He is not even a cypher to decipher. Demystyfication clearly does not work if you do not deal with both the toxicity and the ‘aura’ of such online celebrities and the myth of their success feeding on itself. Not in order to ‘smear’, to sacrifice them (as Thiel fantasized in his sacrificial mythopoetic flights of imagination), nor to adulate or pimp them further. They do not need this because they have armies of followers (50 million on TW), nor is it interesting to focus on such idolized targets (and increasingly dangerous) – at a time where everything is tied to personhood. Musk is no superhero nor is he a monster or Marvel villain, although he likes to LARP as one. The media certainly encourages him to do so. That’s not say techno pessimism or tech billionaire bashing is the solution – but rather to see what gets excluded or how cautionary tales are transformed into realities.
What stands out is how he plays on certain SF tropes and a certain pop iconography that pre-existed the rise of Space X or Tesla. Such a mid-XX century infatuation with the future or a certain total future of societies completely transformed by technology does not hold currency in today’s best SF, yet it still pervades commercial mass culture (least Western mass culture) and the minds of tech billionaires. Or in SF terms the ‘rapture or revenge of the nerds’ on the societies that shunned them. The world of Mars colonization, of libertarian no-government no-interference and microchipped pigs – is the world of the Golden Age of SF. The new inventors are not new at all, they are revived American imperialistic Gilded Age dreams with its electrical wizards that are hardened callous capitalist inventors, and half wondershow showmen performing demo- spectacles for us all. This only happens, if it ditches and deletes the anti-colonial and anti imperialistic tenor of such early works as HG Well’s War of the Worlds. If you are still entranced by these tech billionaire’s self-confessed SF fannishness, please contrast them with the vibrancy and biting wit of an author like Alfred Bester. That is why in spite of its ‘dare-do’ and ‘no panic’ signs theirs is a severely constrained and conservative worldview. For all its preoccupation with X-risk, extinction and saving the human species, for all its buzz and veneer of newness, such enterprise is ignoring systematically the working condition of their employees. There is “no future” outlook – because they refuse systematically to actually stay with the trouble here on Earth. One can witness daily for oneself how this impoverished yet productive techno capitalist SF is selling huge amounts of easily repackaged “buzz”. That does not mean we should ignore or pretend such such “buzz” does not exist. So while annoyance is almost inevitable it is also important to address the obsolescence cycles, hyped attractiveness and overrated aesthetics of the “gimmicky” and the “gadget”– that Suzanne Ngai puts at the center of our hyper-consumer culture. Just consider like Lepore does the adventure of letter “X”. X is ubiquitous in SF. Lepore makes an incredible roller coaster ride through the history of this letter’s adoption by futurists, scientists and popular science accounts of progress. How did such X- become required, why does it stick to X- Risk? And how does X signal novelty automatically, or how does it conjure up eXtra planetary visions or X-files and X-men?
Lepore is a historian and as a historian, she digs into a lot background materials, pop residues and infusions, focusing on how such actual contemporary figures tend to look more and more like Marvel characters than their baseline human counterparts. She digs not only into family stories – the largely ignored South African Apartheid background of Musk, but also a larger background of ideas and fads like the Technocracy movement (not to confuse with the Bogdanovist tectological ideals of a meta-science of organization) of the 1930s that his grandpa was involved with. What is evident in this case is that entrepreneurs can cherry-pick and built-up on de-fanged versions of critical and ironic materials such as Douglas Adams’s The Hitch Hicker Guide, or even online jokes and (Dodgecoin) memes to exploit and build expectations and turn reality upside down, topsyturvy riding the speculative wave that runs rampant on fictions and online chatter. What proliferates in this milieu is a particular brand of reading and using such SF materials and then trampoline oneself across from startup to startup, if possible never admitting wrongdoing or losses. There’s also a worrying alignement of space colonization revivals and back to the moon plans and conservative politics in the states. There’s also no mystery about Space X having contracts with the military since it all turns out to bs less an escape plan than a battleground strategy. It’s visions are more Star Wars than Star Trek and the DoD is backing it all up with 1 billion $.
What Jill Lepore terms “Muskism” is plain capitalism don’t kid yourselves, yet this recognition can barely keep up with these unleashed speculative, no limits yet incredibly farcical, bland and gee whiz forms of extreme techno-scientific capitalism. This does not mean there is a qualitative change or that we are entering another stage of cosmic capitalism. Yet it is worth grounding it, looking into its material origins, its diffusion, productivity, institutional effects. It’s not about technological pessimism but accepting that there are trade-offs and question why its few beneficial effects never get mentioned or never never the press attention (such as the battery farm in Australia). What does get mentioned is how tech entrepreneurs and ‘founders’ actually read, pillage or speculate around such pop influences and preexisting iconography. What type of scientific and technological imaginaries are we left with? How can one understand the current political and economic situation by looking into the real Cold War foundation of Marvel’s (or Stan Lee’s) Iron Man that became such a model for Musk. What has Peter Pan and fairy dust and Neverland having to do with mining crypto coins, or what do other less discussed science fiction stories from the 1900 (The Moon Metal by Garrett Putman Serviss) tell us about gold, inventing equivalents to gold or 1970s getting off the gold standard.
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics, history, law, and literature. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, her latest, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, longlisted for the National Book Award.
“The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.
Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.
The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.” (from the Goodreads description)
1. Do you think that imagining the future could be the first step to contribute in manifesting it?
First, let’s not limit the power of imagination, this “capacity” to imagine to just our common use of it as only pertaining to humans, a unique human faculty or a particular ability. Just a capacity of the capacious. A fantabulous happy extension of an evolved cognition, the marked and significant difference of lionized primates, such as humans used to feel as their branch diverged from other related species.
Let’s imagine that imagination is certainly more widely found and more basic than expected – a precondition to all the other “higher” faculties regarded by many as superior or distinctive.
For me and for others it feels more and more important to be able to accept and speak for example about bacteria or non-sapient blue-green algae in these nearly frivolous, imaginative terms. There is a comics from 1979 based on ideas by Dr Timothy Leary, a Neurocomics that treats the primordial soup as an irreverent cocktail of excitable ingredients, utterly promiscuous, and imaginatively spilling over (pls check the digital version here https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/1760/ ).
Let us see how we can question our own favorite evolutionary just-so stories, stories that get constantly remade. What about a story that shows how our particular transformation was achieved historically from distantly related, non-neuronal, brainless beginnings? Let us understand, with our current brains the way of being in the world of organisms that enjoy their lives without a central nervous system.
What do you do with this “imagination” that presupposes a complete lack of imagination around itself?
It would be worthwhile investigating how we can recognize or include the manifestation of an imagination that is clearly phylogenetically and epigenetically overflowing, one that complicates the arbitrary borderlines of a standard neuro- intelligence model. A more gradual and universal one. One that would put to shame our supposed neurotypical preferences. And even as this model gets more and more untenable, it tends to slide, captivated and kidnapped, lured by the supposedly lower ‘concrescent’ reality of the world.
With this background of unequal distribution hovering around us – a (preposterous) scarcity of imagination in the history of biological life that became the main tale told by the life sciences, we have arrived at a moment of crossroads. I considered my contact with STS (Science and Technology Studies) and history of science important because it made me question the very restricted and canonical histories told by the life sciences about themselves or as transmitted by generations and generations of biology manuals.
Otherwise, we keep risking remaining conceptually blocked in our physio-chemical understanding, blindfolded by the dominance of one domain, resisting all those ideas arising out of various domains of the evolving life sciences, losing our chance to keep up with all the new discoveries being made all the time.
Some call it a “Crisis of the Imagination”. I do not know if it is a crisis or not, but it would be a mistake to attribute it by default to the human, or Germaine to the fine arts, therefore entirely and exclusively human or humanistic. A crisis is only one if it keeps mired in just coffee talk about quantum physics and string theory while forgetting about various levels of symbiosis levels, of the role played by extremophile Archeobacterial lifeforms living in impossible (for us) conditions, or about the iconic role played by Tardigrades, seen everywhere online and offline, seemingly the perfect pre-adapted for life in outer space and pop SF series such as Star Trek.
It is important to see how we get socially constrained and so strict when and if we imagine a future, a common future imagined not just by some bipedal apes. Imagination is somewhere else then, especially if it does not help us imagine another world. Imagination is an agential and tangentially unpredictable mode, actively and reactively involved in emanating, speculating, fabulating, emitting “other kinds” of worlds.
If we refer strictly to the patriarchal and systemically racist capitalism we currently participate in, one that has subjugated and exploited billions and billions of species on this planet crushing this world in its grasp, it feels more impossible or unachievable than ever to exercise our imagination. It becomes very easy to imagine why we live materially in our very own flesh and bodies the closing in of a creaking opportunity window without being able to do something about it.
Our current worldview, where other worlds have been condemned to stand on the losing side of the equation, prefers the word “unfit” – a term that puts all in the same box as maladaptive, improbable, wasteful or impossible. This strictly Adaptationist worldview is more and more maladaptive itself, and I mean here that is presupposes this fitting in as essential and unavoidable. To fit is to have to practically accept all injustices. This view justifies and rationalizes all economic and energophage inequalities, and is more and more evident and obscene by the day.
What do stromatolites dream of? What do stromatolites imagine while belching gases, not as individual cells, but as planet-wide biomass, on a grand scale collectively, contributing to a world of tomorrow under oxygenation/oxidation just a few billions of years away?
Can you identify in these bubbles of inklings of an imagination floating during a period almost impossible to imagine in human cortical terms, that made possible our ‘humaness’ that is still narrowly defined as western and whose understanding limits itself to a rusty technoscientific imaginary.
A lack of imagination that can barely communicate the vastness and scaling necessary to assess the cumulative effects of millions of exhausts pipes and changes that do not take place during millions but decades (our own lifetimes)?
Technoscience stimulated by imagination for profit is making itself responsible for the unfair mass extermination of countless species. On the other hand, it is a science that has offered as an unprecedented and vertiginous look into “deep time” and has tried to familiarize us with the hidden contribution of unknown ones. Of course, there is countless other non-modern of pre-modern examples from non-Eurocentric societies from all around the world that cherished and acknowledged this overwhelming contribution by other creatures, beings, entities, spirits.
Science is only now finally recognizing the collective work of inhuman, non- more than human (more than fungus, more than plant etc) ones, a work that produced this outer protective layer calle atmosphere. A layer where we started walking and became conscientious of late, without therefore asking ourselves who made this protecting shield that has protected us and other creatures from most of the cosmic rays or UV radiation during millions of years.
This atmospheric or climatic imagination implies the apparition of a future where free-floating cells dividing continuously got stuck to each other, never alone anymore and only sporadically and dangerously autonomous inside their larger organismic units (see for ex our current understanding of the evolution of cancer cells).
These cells, meanwhile, started showing behaviors of a vaguely coordinated organized kind, a quorum-sensing that took life to another level than mere individualities, making waving coordination into a “ciliary collective walk”.
The very first levels of organization that enabled early movements appear as a disequilibrium of hundreds of microscopic ciliated cells in a gradient field – as the movements made today by multicelullar model organism Trichoplax adhaerens, considered one of the most basal metazoans.
Our extremely complicated brains are now unable to grasp why there is no need for brains to obtain the first cellular coordination of millions of cells, yet today we definitely struggle to obtain large scale coordination in a Ministry for the Future (as per Kim Stanley Robinson), so that we can preempt a nearly inevitable situation: the climate crisis. Difficult to perceive, to conceive and start imagine this very basic advancement of tissues or differentiated cellular lines as they search their spatial-temporal momentum…
2. Does a critical-analytical perspective of the past have a constructive role in modeling the future in your view?
I am agreeing with those that say we should try to circumscribe the finitude of such a total future – a totalizing future such as the one promoted by a series like Star Trek let’s say (even if I continue watching and enjoying it!). The series was bold enough to include gigantic tardigrade-like extraterrestrial beings navigating a mycelial network that holds the galaxies together, or a character called Stamets based on actual mycologist and mushroom enthusiast Paul Stamets. On the other hand, one should embrace the possibility that one is always partial, in the sense of being part and partial whenever exploring such present possibilities and future impossibilities.
Let us keep a big warning about a future that imposes one single unchanging version of the future upon all other species and the rest of humanity.
Let say a unique future based on just such a “warp drive” invention, i.e. the impact of one invention that pushes inevitably everything into the Faster Than Light era. Yes, it is an imaginary invention, but one that directs exclusively towards a total future. This is something if not entirely problematic, then full of lacunae that are not immediately noticeable, especially when that totalization is made around a technologically privileged group or one single invention.
Maybe a philosopher would say that such an analytic or critical perspective is a direct follow-up to the post-Kantian heritage that has divided western philosophy into suburbia of the mind with separated continental traditions and analytical ones.
I am not a philosopher so I will not go into detail. I will ask those interested to ask themselves in what why does any type of future depend on something more humble than what we have taken into account, even given our lofty evolutionary position, a minor something that does not even get mentioned in those version of a totalizing future.
Here is this simple observation by Charles Mudede, writing on the Seatle Slog, about the absence of green plants on the spaceships of the United Federation of Planets (the main supranational stellar union mentioned in the ST universe). Plants, as the primary providers of energy on the planet, or at least on this planet, are completely circumvented, ignored, overlooked, etc.
One of the most symptomatic under-currents of SF was cyberpunk sub genre that gets crystallized in the 1980s during the ballistic missile race btw the East and West blocks and during the first massive wave of neoliberal restructuring. As a genre it appears at a precise place – the city of Vancouver, Canada. It is a future placed in a city where the past is not perceived as surpassed, unreachable, deleted and where layers of time coexist, where you have to make use and make do with what has existed or will exist, old or new, low tech or high tech (here taking my cues from C. Mudede).
At the same time we are now in a better position to see why the Silicon Valley Californian future is not at all somber and opaque, oppressively corporate-like in the classical cyberpunk narratives, but more like a transparently corporate habitat, inexhaustible exhausting wellness and profoundly libertarian and anti-syndicalist mood more akin to The Circle movie from 2017.
Nevertheless, the cyberpunk inheritance makes it clear why we are not just neighbors to our actual neighbors or our actual flights of imagination, but neighbors to all the crazy rich and all the business park dreams on the whole planet.
It is important to understand that this cyberpunk, initially Canadian, does not repudiate temporal layering and temporal intermingling. It does permit the persistence of a constantly perishing present, temporal complicity towards futuralism, especially when PKD’s obsolescent androids and exclusive premium robotic sheep coexist.
3 How do you see the role of contemporary culture in relation with the future?
I think I partially answered this above.
Contemporary culture is too much “culture” and this search for the eco-critical dimensions that includes laboratory cultures (as in tissue cultures or yogurt cultures) comes with very meager offerings and maybe overly defined by Danone possibilities and lack of funds for blue-sky research, with a preponderance of big tech lobbies.
From Raymond Williams we have learned how difficult it is to define culture, risking to leave out somebody, abusing and emptying this word while at the same time diminishing conflicts or inherent transformations.
It is important to see how – the future is totally decoupled from the new or the truly new, in total divergence from that future promised in genre movies, in the sense that every new thing ‘is more of the same’. This monetized future is already portioned, auctioned, packaged and sold using cryptocurrencies and complex financial instruments (the so-called fintech), some of which are actually called futures. Crypto currencies belie their underlying materiality and so manage to escape our attention because we tend to forget that they run on physical infrastructure, on computers that are sometimes fueled by leftover fossil fuel somewhere at the Polar or Arctic North like in one Canadian advert trying to attract new investments.
Even if we feel placed at the bottom end of financialization, we can take this recent campaign by the BRD bank “You are the Future” and see in what way the pressures of contemporary culture (represented by financial institutions) amplify the surrounding climatic and ecological pressures on individuals, on personal payment plans, etc. and especially on this recurrent YOU – as unitary, ethnopolitical, indebted or having to pay rate till forever.
Everything is still sadly transposed in terms of you or him, or her.
It remains to be seen how much is this going against a situation that is in no way easy to isolate, locally or individually, or how slow and after how much struggle some populations and expressions, ecologies, bodies, genders, multiplicities etc. will carve themselves a space in contemporary consciousness and attention.
I think that SF in the sense of speculating and fabulating, or as speculative fiction, fantastic or scientific speculation has this role of culturally translating for both interlocutors, exactly like a device from the SF movies that can deliver meanings almost involuntarily from one extraterrestrial language into another. No unadulterated transmission, but a transmission with twists and modifications – creatively and imperfectly translating realities that necessarily surpass the individual level, the human limits of perception, especially if dealing with social, scientific and technical transformations that are impossible to calibrate.
4. Do you think that the study of the future will have a constructive impact if it would get included in the educational curriculum?
I would definitely prefer to alternate this impeding hype, the pressing and oppressing futurological drive with other things.
Maybe it is high time to include in the school curriculum something about speculative fiction instead, going back to your first question.
Embracing futurology has to be nuanced, especially if one refers to a type of future forecasting typical of the banking sector, or the start-up kind. We should have the utmost care and reservations here, taking into account the fact that everything that has to do with prognosis and forecasting from is completely engaged in ensuring the impossibility of a common future.
Futurology as packaged by tech pundits and tech gurus is easy to find, because the world seems to be full of quite myopic visionaries, even dangerous ones, in the sense that uncertainties are nowadays packaged as manageable risks and externalized on others. We do not need more singularity salesmen, or agents of a more or less conscious optimization that touches upon everything but does not change anything fundamentally.
We should always be wary and vigilant about this futurology frustrated by the borders of this world and in search of tax evasions, off-shore futurology of neglect that has become a sort of scourge, an exercise in externalizing risks on the backs of others, offering cheap predictions on demand (*or expensive one if one takes into account the habitats and lives lost in exchange): a simple business deal dressed up as a very rudimentary SF.
First, education itself is left without a future.
All those with a degree end up without a viable future, jobless, without any pension plans and ready to fall trough the gaps of a system that prepares highly qualified people for bullshit jobs. I refer directly to those jobs discussed by the late David Graeber in his book and familiar to most of us today. Even if I don’t have such a job at the moment, the clock is ticking, and I will sure join in, because there is nothing else for me.
You do not have a future, because this is the future of work, of the learned skills turned worthless in today’s terms, of careers based on educational systems have become all a subject of speculative investments and divestment. Today at the stock exchange one can bet on the lack of future of certain careers and what one is learning and hoping to graduate in. All the unprofitable lessons, the obsolete school manuals they are based on, the slowness of re-qualification or costliness of retraining get correlated by algorithms to academic disciplines and careers with loosing odds.
At the same time, the educational systems have dealt only very late with the neurodivergent, the non-neurotypical, with minds that do not obey or coincide with what was considered standard everywhere in the past. Also, very, very late we are finally starting to see jobs that take into account the autism spectrum disorders or an educational curriculum that is more inclusive in this sense.
The way our studies are being sponsored and financed always in regard to a certain future income, of either being coupled with future “liquidity” or not, gets everyone reduced to constant payment status or the incapacity to be such a source of regular payments. It gets tied down to the incapacity to reimburse in time the debt accrued during your education years.
Not only is risk calculated so that investors or shareholders would be repaid – only then you are ‘worth it’, or incentivized, only then you become part of the “meritocratic” scheme, only and only if your future career can be monetized so that you can enjoy today a scholarship or be worth all those tuition borrowings.
Betting is not just the usual corner shop betting joint, that one is just a small picturesque neighborhood get-together. We have a much more insidious betting on the potential lack of future of a large majority of school students or of students whose education was devalued from the start, or that becomes just a reason for upping the bets.
It is easier and easier to bet on the certainty of educational failure, on the loosership of certain disciplines or the obsolescence of pedagogic systems that have spent money and time to train us humans in the past and the present. Let’s just think about such classical domains as the natural sciences, or the dwindling number of field scientists, the disenfranchised humanist or liberal arts, as well as all the vocational schools of the socialist times.
We also have today this creative sector – already the main betting horse of the new economy, on one side completely fragilized and highly dependent on applications and all manner of extra financial supplements and on the other – the poster independent sector of new, so-called smart cities. All these shrinking and polluted cities that need to reinvent themselves constantly in order to attract investors and clean their image (what happens in Timisoara “and soon in the whole country!” to rhyme in with the Revolution 1989 slogan).
Sometimes the students who can afford the costs of high theory of highly-rated teachers and interesting courses – are already from the privileged classes, those that come from rich milieus from the very start (I am saying this because of acquaintances that do this kind of teaching in Germany, so it is not just an Eastern European thing).
On the other hand, there is so much educational material online, so many videos, tutorials, fabulous YT channels – be it philosophy, transgender studies, dialectics, history of science, technology, political economy etc cultural studies, biohacking etc.
Yet it is true that one gets to them when already exhausted, bored and disillusioned.
If you do not represent an investment, a vested interest, you are suffering all sorts of consequences, mental and bodily ones.
On the other side the paradox is that nobody dictates your curriculum any longer, you can choose what and how to built up your ‘looser’ educative kit, for the very fact that such courses do not represent an investment, no winning bet, and you can maybe use this false freedom to combine the most unwieldy materials and contradictory things. For example let us imagine a course based on SF speculations about education from the future and immediate examples about educational betting or critical theory and afro pessimist thinkers.
I can tell you I am working on something that I hope will never end.
Because you specifically called it project – I will pick up on this complete mess of a word, on the fact that we already describe this way our work or this type of structure where we find ourselves no matter what.
When you say ‘project based’ you are employing the neoliberal newspeak – trying to dissimulate this type of nomadism from project to project for what it is – a complete disaster, a way to embellish and make it sound cool, while it is actually a common disease and a currently incurable one.
And I want to include here that blind tech-nomadism, of carrying your workspace, working from a distant beach, no matter if you work for NATO, for humanitarian purposes, or for the election campaign in another country, using your skills no matter what the requirements, exactly the way Cambridge Analytica did it (just one infamous case among many I guess).
Why are these things valued in this way on the job market? Why are such beach remote working positions made possible etc promoted in adverts with the promise of a fat paycheck that helps you jump planes like a DJ from country to country? Well, this is sure one of the most toxic and polluting things existing on the planet today.
I am also migrating from Bucharest to Berlin and back and have tried to keep this come n go at a minimum. Very few can afford a fixed place. Very few are employable in anything but on a project base, where and when the project season is on. These projects are a euphemism for free-lancing, a reality that hides a cynical mercenary lifestyle without illusions and without much future talk. You are good for everything and good for nothing.
This sez a lot about the type of obsolescence that these projects imposed because whenever finished or evaluated, they get sent away and behind there is not much left. Eventually, just online crumbs that you can barely match or explain or replicate.
It is a research literature that is cherishing a variety of ideas and authors, a SF that has become truly global (what did we know about Indian, Arab, Korean, pan-African SF 50 odd years ago, or even about a wider understanding of Easter European SF?).
Partly vaccinated in this way we can dive into deeper waters, catch hold of mutations, frog leaps and qualitative jumps and acknowledge their relevance for now as well as for the future.
In its short version, I spontaneously caught it on TV, during one of the Minderiads (mineriade in RO) from Bucharest in the 1990s. From the streets we received our daily screen portions of televised audio-visual TV realism. On one of those Mineriads that remain in the collective memory as brutal and violent, from a group of miners brought from the Vale Jiului coal mining towns, one turns around towards the camera and is asked by the TV crew what are his demands.
I kid you not! I want to take this minor anecdote and make into something quite serious and fundamental. In my regard – this TV fragment does not just reflect the cheesy, dunk humor and naivete of those years.
For me this quite provocative response from a young miner arriving in the Romanian capital city from the mining towns that would soon be ruined and shut down, give us a first tectonic sign that something is massively changing behind the scenes – that behind these televised events there is the transition from one industry to the next.
How does a miner from Valea Jiului, from the core fossil fuel extractive industries, from the soon to be dis-empowered miner syndicates – become a fan?
How does the fan get born from the settled soot of the working class? A fan, let us not forget, that is engrossed by a US-Canadian series about biodroids, immortalist bosses, digitization, experiments gone rogue, abandoned cities, lots of rusty iron, intelligent machines and the first decent 3D effects meant to give body to a vision of dystopic dimensions of a specific nature. A no-future, post-industrial landscape for people that had to deal not only with the post-human but also with a world of post-work. Where does the factory move, how does one consume, relax and gets fascinated by the history of one’s own disintegration, of “restructuring” and its own crumbling representation?
More importantly maybe, what does it mean to loose a world? What does it mean to live trough the disappearance of your world, and what does it mean to not find a place any longer in it?
From a working-class hero he becomes on TV a villain while watching it live on premium hour. We notice this shift, from a representative of those fundamental means of production, from a worker from a glorified industrialism branded almost overnight as polluting and unwanted but which gave him a collective bargaining power when confronting the dehumanizing mechanisms and pressures of capital, a shift that places him not in the back seat – but in front seat of an unwanted future.
How does this fan almost instantly become jobless, media literate and tele-visually integrated at the same time entangled in a cinematic or computational mode of production (to use the Jonathan Beller’s terms). He transforms and is transformed in his own main opponent, in the class enemy of the newly green-washed electronic industries that evangelize their zero emission goals.
At the same time, he is becoming a prosumer fan with a Netflix subscription plan, a fanatic of online streamed series. He is ready to binge-watch, netflix & chill and eager to influence the production of his favorite series and shape his favorite titles, ready to feel entitled, even ready to start planning and organizing the next Comicon together with Kaufland in Bucharest. This puzzle I feel I am involved in since a few years, if not from the moment I have seen this fragment on TV during the 90s immediately after the Revolution, a fragment one should revisit and think with even now.
6. How do you see your profession/your projects in the future?
I think we can regroup all these together with the above question.
As mentioned I suffer from a constant de-professionalization, I forget what I use to do or am supposed to do, and have gotten to the situation where it is very hard to explain or to justify myself in front of those that ask me what are you working on actually, how much is your salary, where do you get your income? What did you work on? What do you want to do now, or want to do in the future?
I get the feeling that I refused or allowed myself to refuse too many jobs whenever I was offered them during the heyday of easy offerings, refusing this enviable possibility to settle in a particular institution. This has eloped me, so I cannot pretend I have an overview on my own doings and goings.
Most of the people I know already have their .com or .ro or have built more or less assiduously a career, a trajectory, a fixed base, more or less engaged in the management of the self-image. What I see with me is a cemetery of projects, shipwrecked blogs etc.
One important thing is when your friends drag on you, and I start to appreciate this more and more, even as you did it now with this interview. I think this has been one of your favorite methodologies all along, even if not systematically pursued. I appreciate it when somebody tries to involve, question me without a particular end-result, because I’ve become more and more skeptical about all these self-evaluations. I am talking about the flighty untimely moment when somebody comes and tells you to come and join in, let’s meet, let’s think about it together. Even when ghostwriting, mind you, or pretending to be an AI!
This while each is streamlining and bulldozing his yellow brick road towards solitude. If everyone tries to actualize – in the current default talk, you completely start feeling incapable of ever doing something together with others, and I also include myself in this bizarre situation.
I had the luck and joy to collaborate interuptedly with you, with Sebastian Big, with Declan Clarke, with Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu, Alexandra Croitoru, Vasile Leac, Milos Jovanovic, the early trio Nanca/Cosm/Gontz as I knew them once, Mimi Salajean, Mihai Lukasz, Sara Lehn, Nita Mocanu, Candidatura la Presedentie, Lucas Cantori, Ovek Finn, Dyslex, Philou from Come N Go (or this is his core band for me), Mabento Makunouchi, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Anca Benera, Biroul Melodramatic, Valentina Desideri, Bezna, Kavdanska & Dilmana, Manuel & Brynjar, Mircea Nicolae & Victor Plastic (as I met them), Nicu Ilfoveanu, with Alt Art, Protocol Cluj, Tamtam, ODD, Mes 56, with Mort “braindead” la Creier, Ion Dumitrescu, Alienocen Outernational, Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nae Timotei Drob, Nicolae Comanescu, Clubul Convivialis, Cristian Darstar, Utopiana, Szilard Miklos, Florentin Tudor from Rusu & Flore, Fundatia Tranzit Sibiu si Bucuresti, Colectia Energii Regenerabile de la Fractalia and much more in what reads like some bizarre automatic writing… many more that should have probably get mentioned here.
With many more I did not collaborate directly but had the pleasure to meet, contact and enjoy their company. I cherish the rare moments I tried to curate something in the past.
I enjoyed when Mihaela Dragan invited me to talk about the Romacene and SF. I was glad that the Arhiva de Sunet came over in Drumul Taberei hood to talk about sounds from Timisoara. I enjoyed talking with students about indie horror movies, starting from the Bodrog the movie experience. I regret not organizing a cozzzmonautica at the Cuca Festival (which I still hope I will). I truly enjoyed writing about the composer Octavian Nemescu for muzica imaginara, just before he departed this world.
I felt very good being invited by Gabi P.N.E.A. to contribute to his blog Timespacewarps as a place of churning and collating and trying out ideas, sounds, perceptual trajectories & apperceptual notions, all these un-hoped for splashes in growing data pools.
More and more difficult as this conviviality becomes – this communal labor is quite improbable, as an occasion to socialize outside the social platforms towards a common task as per Feodorov dwindle down. I really enjoy this co-opting, and try not to count them or to do any rankings – always glad to return the favor, whenever I get the nerve to involve others in return.
7. What is your relation with Artificial Intelligence, or with robots?
I think I just wrote something towards this end on the blog I am contributing to with Gabi. It is a discussion starting from the recent movie by the French video clip director Seth Ickerman, a sort of age-restricted musical video clip, mostly a retro SF biopunk full of sex magick and synthwave sounds by Carpenter Brut https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/08/24/1930-blood-machines-mini-series-2019
I even have a few quite amateurish recordings uploaded on a soundclound account, a sort of plunderphonics using some linux audio software from years back https://soundcloud.com/earth-evacuation-plan/data-recovery-foundation-tapes-i-choam-corporationplanet-kaitain I think that you can hear there how my relation with what we call today AIs or robots or entities has developed, since it takes into account not only the cinematic or gaming industry examples but all the imaginary spillover all around us.
We have somehow these retrograde AIs, stuck in their virtual asistant roles that hear you, peeping on you whenever you least expect it, although under surveillance capitalism you should expect it all the time. We worry about who or what is influencing us, but we never seem to worry how we influence AIs instead, in regard of the fact that they carry a lot more agency and decisive power nowadays, deciding over the chances of many other humans, because they integrate human cultural biases almost without regulation or filtering etc. although things started changing.
For those interested, I urge them to listen these recordings on earphones and try to imagine them as part of a memory implant, residual coaching of future employees from various fictional inter-planetary corporations. More than 6 years have passed since I made this sound collage with the track name – CHOAM Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles – exactly the corporation from Frank Herbert’s Dune that takes care of mining the spice.
So you see I am interested more about these secondary aspects, those that fall off the main equation, the way in which the very attention and buzz around “Intelligence Explosion” or the “Super Intelligence X-Risk” tends to monopolize informal meetings at the Davos conferences from Switzerland (a few years ago). I am interested in the way a paradox or mere speculation about AIs feeds into the fears of certain high-ranking, ultra rational communities characterized by efficiency and singularity search. How curious that their attention is being disturbed, grabbed or invaded by a future AI hyperstition like Rocco the Basilisk?!
You said how do you relate – I am interested in the relational at in its most fragile and remote, this delicate relationality, easy to break, the way these feeble connections are sometimes the most important ones, not the stronger and stable ones.
In the theory of networks – these wispy links would be the most important ones, NOT the verified and tested ones, those links for example that bind members of a conspirative group, members of clan, a family, of a mafia, of a political class, of a clique etc but those that can literally hang almost on one single strand of hair.
Another weak strong inter-relation that suddenly came to the foreground is the non-intelligent nature, a non-intelligence, a non- smartness that is very basic and gets upcycled by capitalism and especially by this growing traveling jet set.
I refer to the simple fact that COVID virus reached out so much of the planet using previous cheap flight networks, touristic routes, carried and pulled in this race that is extremely lopsided and with differing speeds of vaccination and mutation that gave rise to resistant strains that you could never call intelligent.
8. How do you see the relation between technology and nature in the future?
I think I got a problem with this relation that gets chocked by a tunnel vision of one single technology – let say lets say the choke-hold on our imagination that some historical technologies have got on our explanatory power.
The way our descriptions have helped in mistreating or exploiting the various sub-divisions of life, or the way such technologies have been used as misguided metaphors or as outdated models that got reified and retained with quite damaging material results.
There is this insidious feeling that I can let myself being carried along by a certain easiness or frivolity following in the steps of the ex-mathematician A N Whitehead and the many that have taken his hints in various directions – such as Isabelle Stengers or Steven Shaviro among others – maybe I can even call my friend Ion Dumitrescu one of those. Of Whitehead’s lack of contempt towards the role of feelings and generosity towards the new, inherent in his thinking. I am not carried by his very elaborate “scheme”, but taken on board by his very encouraging tone that tries to think against the grain, or in spite of all the dead weight of all those philosophical orthodoxies.
There is a new appetite, towards a certain new kind of realism – a realism that is measured and balanced by debates about the world in all its aspects. It is a new courage of being part of a tangible reality not completely dissociated from the absolutely intangible and bizarre universe described by the physical sciences.
Maybe this is one of the few available ways of avoiding the strictures of replication or testability typical for scientific positivism as well as a way to get ahead of the game that has chained theoretical physics to biases and aesthetic presuppositions (like those highlighted by Sabine Hossenfelder in her provocative Lost in Math: How Beautry Leads Phyisics Astray 2018).
As an example SF should not be regarded just as a metaphor, or just exclusively a literary genre, but something direct, inevitably shared all around us, with utmost concreteness. At the same time SF offers a insistent yet vague affective palette, a literal sensor or a tool kit that can help us learn and unlearn to live with technologies, in order to multiply the experiences of another cosmotechnology.
An example would be Jeff Vandermeer (Southern Reach trilogy, or the Borne cycle). Vandermeer, just to take this well-knowns example, a relative fresh one at that – that somehow mediates and stimulates the need for an environmental posthumanism, one that has not nostalgia towards anthropocentrism, free of the residues of human exceptionalism. And this, importantly, without being misanthropic or an adorer of Gaia theory that risks falling prey to green-brown eco-fascisms as many do indeed.
His proposal – if I can call it that is to be completely immersed, co-dependent and transformational, but not in the sense of current workplace flexploitation, and at the opposite pole of domineering suprematist transhumanism that is somehow ultra-humanist and exclusivist.
I see in Vandermeer’s offer a certain critical posthumanism, pessimist and mature at the same time, but also with a lot of trust in utopian promiscuity, enriched by ambiental transhumanism and multi-species perspectives that once theorized feel more sterile and sparse than what he and others manage in their books.
Borne is for example a living weapon – biotechnology that went rogue, a feral experiment conceived as a very complex weapon that starts growing and blooming, and that seems to have a very imprecise teleology or final purpose.
Nobody knows how it got here, or nobody can trace all the necessary gene manipulations that made it possible or those pathways that stimulated its evo-development. Even its metabolism is unclear. All that does not matter because you can never take back things, at a moment when you have to learn to share the world with so many orphaned creatures, so many orphaned biotechnologies, so many banished organisms. Banished by their supposed creators or patent owners, that have long since expired and disappeared or become extinct and unrecognizable.
We have to welcome and learn to accept new refugee ecologies – that have been weaned from the measurements and quantification of the human or their initial laboratory tests (even if there they had their petri dish cradle phase), because the lab itself does not exist any longer or has fused with the entire world.
The world of Jeff Vandermeer from Borne is a world full of beings that have sprung out of the Linnean taxonomy or have left the Natural History museum behind. They are unclassified beasts of an unnatural world, exuberantly dangerous, killing you softly, tearing you to pieces gently, forlorn artificial entities. They are in search for a den wherever they can. Borne is such a found bud, one that is incredibly and attractively full of hidden fangs, a budding poisonous something that is morphing and shapeshifting when you do not look at it.
It is important to understand that it can be incredibly dangerous and at the same time very friendly and cuddly in a terrible, very unfriendly world. Arriving with tendencies and desires in tow that cannot be confused with those of the people around it, no matter how much they wish to see themselves as adoptive parents.
It is an unrecognizable world, where we cannot impose our old pastoral values of forest brotherhood as in the Romanian saying and untouched wilderness sold as România Neîmblânzită (title of a recent Romanian documentary about the supposed wilderness of Romania). Borne is the exact opposite, a preparation for an overly domesticated world that is unbound and that is transforming us almost as quick as we transform it.
We have to let go of the Greek myth that tells us about the damaging things that escaped from Pandora’s Box, because it is senseless to let ourselves be oriented by recurrent mythopoetics and vintage cosmotechnics. We should maybe follow in the lead of what Yuk Hui mentioned in his extended essay, because it is high time to cultivate and learn new things, even from the Chinese technological accounts that seem strange and unusual to many.
We have to understand what to do with such inherited myths of Western progress. What is going on with all these escaped things, with all these unfruitful things, the denied, the disavowed ones, those that left us and got dispersed around the world.
Here I refer to inventions that were never fully ours or technologies invented by others, things that where never owned even by their inventors, brought far from their point of origin, inventions that became so universal and generalized that they entered some vast general intelligence or public domain of unknown and innumerable applications. Like the Chinese magnetic compass, this magnetism is at the core of magnetic resonance visualization technologies or part of the maglev (magnetic levitation) trains such as the Shanghai Transrapid, currently the oldest such commercial maglev tech still in operation.
9. What project are you dreaming about?
Common let us try and avoid the “project” dream – because of them we cannot dream any longer, they do drag on us. Let us rather search for new modes of conviviality – new ways of living co-dependently and not dependent, traveling around ourselves with our attention ecology widening, one gracious step to be able to parse time and space together, with modes of thinking and feeling, shared passions and also a shared disappearance.
Do not overshare – but try to join with unknown friends (or well-known ones) an unknown dusk, not a well-known rising of the sun. I am reading for a few years Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. It is a fabulous way to get lost in the thickets of that book, providing dense vertigo, stylistically flawless, written in 1975 one year before I was born. A shelter of a book for difficult and demanding times, an amorphous bloom that is nearly impossible to keep hold on to and that nevertheless offers numerous stepping stones towards a misaligned friendship and a living in between the cracks of this world.
Sorry for the long post – PNEA just pointed out that the majority of our readers is non-Romanian speaking. Well, below there is an introduction – the exhibition statement in English, maybe a bit abstract but I think it sets the mood for the show. The show itself is has various elements including and Out Of Place artefact discovered in Romania during the 1970s that I got enamored during my youth. It is the so-called Robot Foot from Aiud and was initially dated as being 300.000 yr old being due to the way it was found next to some wooly rhino fossil bones. It was sent to be dated at both the Atomic Energy Institute in Magurele Romania and somewhere in Switzerland and the analysis came as being mostly aluminum. Well, this is one of the those anachronic object that can disturb the smooth succession of the time-space continuum, so we took it as the centerpiece for the show and the logo. We also had a special alien script font developed by Alexandru Pisica Patrata Ciubatariu. We also included a lot of SF zines, we did an entire collage of them with the whole panorama of various publications, DIY zines, SF comics, all produced during the Socialist era and after 1989. We wanted to highlight the diversity and the richness of expression to be found in the SF fandom in Romania in particular, but for the whole East bloc in general. We had a famous documentary by Andrei Ujica included in the show about the last citizen of the Soviet Union, left in space during the days of the collapse of the CCCP. There is much to be talked about – hopefully we will have soon an article by Paula Erizeanu in Calvert Journal in EN about the show. For now here is the statement:
New Temporealities: The Xenogeneses of SF
The objective of „The Xenogeneses of SF” exhibition is to explore novel non-linear temporalities by proposing an imagination exercise in time about time. It is an open invitation to traverse various timelines of newly imagined histories, brimming with speculative worlds. We can imagine and explore together the modalities and material conditions that allowed such worlds to thrive, multiply, support each other, become permanent and eventually get ruined.
We will partially try and follow such aspirations, consequences, deviations, specific to the Sci-Fi phenomenon, while highlighting accumulated side-effects that tend to spill over well beyond such speculative world building sites.
We will invite you to have a deeper look at the role of Sci-Fi, outside of its solely anticipatory or predictive function, as a method of un-predicting, of dis-anticipating and non-actualizing. At the limit, SF takes as a given the fact that exteriority permeates the now and the here.
This exhibition probes something else as well, acknowledging that the known is never fully known, ordinary or matter-of-fact, if we start question the very inevitability of our current world via a specific pop inflected situational SF. It argues that the most banal reality is already an extraterrestrial one, arrived from elsewhere, distorted and ready to be revisited by a SF intensely animated by varieties of never-ever, of nowhere and not yet. We intend to open up a portal or several portals that mediate these two aspects of SF.
The improbability of these worlds may be only improbable and unimaginable under the current circumstance or from the perspective of current scientific consensus, or it can take this state of things as a starting point and push it towards its outermost consequences.
We want to gather such speculative worlds that are made impossible under current economic, technological and social conditions. A techno-scientific worldview that is largely dissociated from the common good and severely hampered by economic and political imperatives as well as having to face unprecedented planetary, climacteric and ecological challenges. A worldview that has been always been co-dependent and constrained in its scope and vision.
The exhibition presents various dynamics and trajectories that have started from the initial SF core communities, from a primary SF fandom, but never remained there, becoming a common concern to us all.
The SF fandom is most probably the oldest organized fandom in Romania and other East European countries, and should be understood as a polymorphic encounter of common interests and transformative passions, clusters of fans, amateurs, artists, engineers,cenaclu club members, game designers, VFX artists, all spread out in time, all speculatively engaged in a imaginative effort and multifarious group-play. Involved in exchanging collective worlds that have well since crossed over beyond their initial place of origin and elaboration.
We start from the idea that wherever you are, even in the most isolated imaginable place, the very extremity of today’s contemporary world will carry you straight into SF, with third kind encounters at every step. We consider that our current reality is closely innervated by these vectors of SF, especially if we just consider those very ways in which SF might help us think and solve unsolvable contradictions, while living and inhabiting in the churn of irreversible mutations that were never tailor-made for us.
Below is a recent interview we gave as a joint curatorial crew to the IQadds online mag.
Practic am luat copypaste de pe site-ul IQads. Dacă se sesizează dăm jos, însă pe de alta parte nu am semnat cu ei nici un contract si aproape toata informatia furnizată aici, în afara strict de intrebarile trimise initial e de la noi, furnizată de mine si Vasile Leac si legată de expoziţia Timpuri Noi. Afland ca miscarea lor e sa fie free câteva zile, dupa care intra dupa paywall, m-am gandit sa salvez aci si sa ramana accesibil mai mult timp. Plus erau nevoie si de niste hyperlinks.
E cumva tipic pentru zilele astea – tu faci research, tu strangi informatii, trimiti raspunsul si la sfârsit ajungi sa platesti pentru propria ta informatie pentru ca e detinuta de platformele altora :)) care au backup juridic etc intorc pe degete legea drepturilor intelectuale etc. Poate gresesc, poate nu, chiar aş vrea să greşesc… Dar Aaron Swartz saracu stia mai bine lucrurile astea.
În acel moment s-a coagulat, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină, ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace, povestesc ei.
Este o expoziţie despre timp, care necesită timp. Cum a luat ea formă explică mai bine în rândurile de mai jos Ștefan Tiron și Vasile Leac. Cei doi vorbesc despre viitorul amanetat, speranțe colective, cum spune SF-ul istoria din România, dar și despre Alien și Dune, Colectia Romanelor SF scoasă de Univers sau amintiri cu oseminte imaginare de giganți din anii 80.
Prima întâlnire cu SF-ul
E greu cu primele – tind să zic că e vorba de lucruri transmise, mediate de altcineva și de altceva. Un punct important – notat ca atare în expozitie, când am folosit SF în titlul ei, am păstrat ambiguitatea dintre termenii ficţiune speculativa (speculative fiction) și science fiction (ambele prescurtate ca SF) care e doar un subset am putea zice din prima.
Una din cele mai pregnante amintiri este filmulAlien de Ridley Scott (1979) povestit înainte să fie văzut de către tatăl unui prieten care fusese în SUA și văzuse acolo filmul în perioada când nu era accesibil la noi. Trebuia să-ți imaginezi totul fără imagini, fără referinţe, exact ca în piesa radiofonicăExpediţie în Crocobauritania (1984), inclusă în expoziţia asta.
Deci tot, inclusiv mediul de pe navă, inclusiv fiinţa aia care îţi ieşea din piept afară şi avea acid în loc de sânge. Apoi importante au fost desigur ecranizărările astea după Lem și Fraţii Strugatski de Tarkovski pe muzică de Eduard Artemiev (chiar dacă autorul Stanislav Lem nu prea era mulţumit), important e de reţinut că e vorba de un SF est-vestic, includ aici și Futureworld (1976), văzut la Favorit și Soylent Green tot din același an, vizionat în anii 1980.
Unul dintre noi a descoperit SF-ul în complet alt context, săpând împreună cu fratele său într-un deal prin anii 85, încercând să dezgroape oseminte de giganţi, cum se zvonea pe atunci, mai în glumă mai în serios, că stau îngropate într-un tumulus din apropierea satului unde a copilărit.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului, postere proiect Laika se intoarce. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Referințe personale și riscul unui joc plicticos
Aș răspunde cumva în raport cu expoziţia curatoriată, căci este foarte uşor să alunecăm pe panta personalului, şi am încercat cât putem să ne ferim de o perspectivă din asta personală, chiar dacă e imposibil să eviţi parcursul individual poţi să încerci asta. Importante au fost în acest sens şi texte teoretice şi critice începând cu Darko Suvin, Florin Manolescu şi Frederic Jameson, şi continuând cuSeo-Young J. Chu, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Mircea Opriţă,Steven ShavirosauSherryl Vint.
Înscriindu-ne într-o largă zonă de studii SF am mers mai mult pe trans-personal și colectiv, căci SF-ul ca fenomen nu credem că poate fi detaşat de aceste legături, sinteze, medii și relaţii sociale uneori aiurizante. Punct important e ultimul an de liceu 1994, petrecut în Alaska la Steller High School când un coleg a organizat o seară de anime unde au rulat Gundam și Akira.
Cred că e mult prea ușor să arunci cu referinţe în dreapta şi în stânga, impunând o referenţialitate geek arogantă de insider, care buclează și nu face decât să confirme lucruri deja aparent para-ştiute și canonizate. Totul riscă astfel să devină joc plicticos de băieţei și rachetuţele lor (şi poate asta și e).
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Planuri si patente OSIM de obiecte zburatoare,OZN din comuna Perişor (Dolj). Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Asta fiind zise, pe lângă turnanta publicaţiilor Nemira din anii 1990, importantă a fost lumea eminamente vizuală a comics-urilor, pe partea de bandă desenată cu subiecte SF, mai ales metamorfoza Image Comics de după 2012, dacă nu greşesc, cu Prophet no 21, apoi mai vechi, binenţeles Incal de la Metal Hurlant, iar pe partea japoneză tot ce a făcut Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo (inclusiv chestii mai puțin cunoscute precum Domu, The Legend of Mother Sarah etc) și mai ales Tsutomu Nihei cu Blame!, Biomega etc. în jurul lui 2000.
Nu mai menționez aici diferite anime și filme pt că nu ne ajunge interviul ăsta. Înainte de 1989, tind să menționez numerele revistei ORION, publicată la Craiova în format mare cu benzi desenate pe ultima pagină de neîntrecutul Victor Pîrligras (Mutanţii se chemă parcă și era o bandă desenată serializată), în două culori (negru, roşu, parcă) care îl cumpăram de la chioşcul de ziare și căruia i-am oferit un loc special în expoziţie.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Print dupa desen original de Walter Riess coperta la Almanah Anticipatia. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat
Importantă în acestă expoziţie considerăm că este și a doua funcție – cea propriu zis speculativă a SF-ului, una care nu e neapărat viitorologică, de predicţie, cât cea de anti-predicţie, cea care nu lasă cele mai negre predicţii, deja operative, deja parte din strategiile militare și privat-corporate să fie singura variantă de posibil. Deci vedem toate mecanismele de anticipare azi ca fiind extrem de problematice, în măsura în care însăşi viitorul educativ așa cum e el jalonat de Venture Capital (în viitoarea ta carieră, să zicem) aproape că buclează şi activează ceea ce prezice.
Astea fiind spuse, merită repetat din când în când – că noul în capitalismul global este mai multe feluri de la fel. Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat ca risc calculabil, el este eminamente vandabil şi profitabil, când nu nu, chiar şi în măsura în care aproape toate generaţiile ulterioare (cu Greta în frunte și o bună parte din populaţia planetei) și-au dat seama că au fost excluşi din propriul lor viitor. Fie ei sunt înhămaţi la datorii şi rate de plată care nici în milioane (de ani?) și generaţii întregi viitoare nu vor putea fi plătite. Fie tot ei, generaţia asta doomer-ilor, au realizat că generaţia precedentă, cea cinică a părinţilor, care este şi generaţia celor care deţin mijloacele de producţie de pe Terra și conturi neimpozabile, nu vor face nimic ca să preîntâmpine catastrofa climaterică care va afecta viitorul celor mai mulţi dintre urmaşii noştri. Pentru asta a curs destulă cerneală deja în romane și antologii de climate-fiction recente care nici nu mai sună a SF pentru că deja vedem cu ochii noştrii ce se întâmplă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Synth si tape loops de Mitos Micleusean. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Ce spune SF-ul românesc despre istoria românească
O foarte bună întrebare, şi aș vrea să răspund la întrebarea asta cu o imagine foarte importantă de pe coperta 4 a revistei ORION nr 3 din 1989, cu un desen făcut de Victor Pîrligras semnat ca fiind din 1983, aflat în studioul SFTV din expoziţie.
issue of the ORION SF zine first published at the end of the 1980s in Craiova by the local Theatre. It was one of the most important and lavish Romanian SF zines offering comics, SF studies criticism, both translations and original works of science fiction literature all in one.
Las pe cele și cei interesaţi să caute să răspundă şi să discute acest desen. Pot da aici un spoiler și spune că este un desen extrem de puternic, ca o gravură alb negru, cu un personaj imobil care cerşeşte. E vroba de un cyborg sau un robot umanoid care stă la marginea străzii cu capul picat, deşurubat din umeri. Este un robot omul străzii, un clochard robotic, sărăcit și aparent abandonat de sistemul social şi sistemul de producţie care l-a creat.
Nu vreau să dăm prea multe hint-uri în acest sens, important e că el arată spre social și spre societate sau lipsa de social în post 1989, şi într-un fel constuie una din cele mai puternice și vizionare, chiar dacă stranii și neliniştitoare mărturii ale SF-ului și societăţii romanâneşti postdecembriste. Ba chiar am putea adăuga globale, sub spectrul unei post-automatizări inegale care nu îndeplineşte promisiunile post-muncii și unde orele de muncă cresc și salariile scad. Un loc unde majoritatea joburilor sunt parte dintr-un gig economy, unde ajungi să dai la pedală fără nici un fel de drepturi şi unde majoritatea nu își mai permit asigurări de sănătate (depanare!) și unde atât roboţii cât și oamenii sunt tratataţi ca fiind obsolescenţi.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Povestea expoziției
Procesul ei a fost visare, și apoi muncă și iarăşi muncă.
Ea a început poate în copilărie dar s-a conturat acum 2 ani, înainte de pandemie, în momentul în care toată lumea în plină pandemie începea să zică, trăim vremuri SF, totul e SF. Deci în acel moment s-a coagulat ea, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace. E vorba de SF-ul aşa ziselor servicii esenţiale, de cele mai periclictate joburi invizibile, ale oamenilor de sacrificiu de pe altarul economiei.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. SFTV #1 -show cu Irina Gheorghe
Pregătirea a constat în multe intâlniri și contacte directe sau la distanţă cu participanţi, susţinătoare şi susţinatori. Nici nu ştim de unde să începem. Că e vorba de vizită de lucru la Muzeul Henri Coandă la localitatea Perişor (Dolj) la OZN-ul montat în faţă de ing. Nicolae Stăncioiu în 2015 şi până la contactul cu cinemateca germană și RBB pentru obţinerea drepturilor de difuzare a documentarului Utopie în Babelsberg despre SF-ul est german cu ajutorul Institutului Goethe. Întâlnirea de la Avanpost în Bucureşti, studio de efecte speciale de sunet, cu sound designer-ul Marius Lefterache care a lucrat la SF-ul Blood Machines.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Am putea spune că ăsta e un alt SF de azi, munca asta de colaborare și susţinere din toate părţile care a devenit imposibilă și greu de conceput.
Inclusiv subtitrat și tradus aceste materiale cu ajutor de unde s-a putut. Am avut sugestii de parcurs cum a fost Out of the Present despre ultimul cetăţean al Uniunii Sovietice rămas în spaţiu abandonat de cei de la sol, documentar de Andrei Ujica, pe care l-am inclus la sugestia Andreianei Mihail. Apoi contactarea grupului de aeronautică prezent în expozitie cu macheta care o vor lansa cât de curând în spăţiu, în Portugalia. Nu mai menționez munca la infografice cu filogeneza și taxonomia meme-lor cu extratereştri, aceasta din urmă realizată de cei de la Trepantsii sau de harta migraţiilor X aliene făcută de Alin Răuţoiu, sau de harta incompletă a cenaclurilor SF facută de Suzana Dan la indicaţiile noastre şi de cronologia (vădit şi ea incompletă) a contactelor extraterestre din Ţarile Române făcută cu ajutorul istoricului Cătălin Ghercioiu.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
S-au putem vorbi despre video eseul Ad Astra Per Aspera făcut de Cristian Drăgan comisionat special pentru acest show, o primă trecere în revistă a istoriei filmului de SF românesc. Sau poate arhivele de reviste şi fanzine sau poveștile de cenaclu SF ale lui Alexandru Ciubotariu, munca de selecţie și xeroxare a acestor materiale.
Sau poate cărţile donate de Ambasada Chinei despre robotica chineză sau Istoria ştiinţei și tehnologiei din China, din trecut până în prezent, misiuni spaţiale chinezeşti şi contactul fructuos avut cu ei în acest sens şi în scopul evidenţierii unei explorări pacifice și non militariste a spaţiului cosmic.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Premisele
Două lucruri care nu cred că decurg din textele aferente expoziţiei şi ar merita menţionate, anume faptul că asociaţia Ephemair – conţine termenul de air, aer, văzduh și că la origini, din câte ştim era visul unui festival dedicat aerului, dedicat baloanelor și diferitelor modalităţi de a pluti și explora văzduhul. Poate nici ei nu ştiu asta, dar asta a fost un posibil punct de decolare, pt ca să nu uităm că primele pioniere și pionieri ai vazduhului, înainte de avioane și de nave au fost cei care au mers în dirijabile, baloane, deci astronautica și explorarea cosmosului este anticipată de etapa baloanelor plutitoare umplute cu aer.
Altă sursă importantă ascunsă o consider ideea lui Miklos Szilard care a și curatoriat împreună cu Mircea Nicolae un show la Rezidenta BRD Scena 9 despre Matthis-Teutsch, la rândul lui o punte interesantă dintre avangarda clasică și viitorologie de tip realism constructiv (cum o numea Teutsch). Szilard zicea mai în glumă mai în serios că dacă nu ar fi făcut expo cu Teutsch ar fi făcut un call pentru o navă spaţială construită de free lanceri ca să le trezească conştiinţa de clasă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
O expoziție despre timp care are nevoie de timp
Repet, cel mai important este să o vadă şi să îsi lase timp pentru ea, căci este o expoziţie şi despre timp… care necesită timp. Tangenţial este și despre schimbarea percepţiei referitoare la timp, la timpul rămas dacă a mai rămas, şi despre o temporalitate nouă, specifică banilor și lichidităţii capitalului, am putea zice, cum precizează un text important semnat de Bogdan Popaîn ziarul expoziţiei de Centrul Dialectic și alăturat lucrării lor Bani Gheaţă, instalată în camera 5.
Altfel putem ruga publicul să nu se aștepte la o expoziţie care arhivează sau face o arheologie a fenomenului SF, ci una care se vrea speculativă ca atare, care lucrează chestionând cu mijloacele specifice SF-ului, starea de fapt actuală. Nu are sens să predicăm sau să pretindem o expertiză în acest sens, ci mai curând să oferim publicului și neiniţiatilor o cale de acces, îndemnându-i să îsi compună și construiască împreună o expertiză într-un domeniu vast, cu milioane de publicaţii și expresii.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Trebuie să fim critici dar nu condescendenţi faţă de modul în care alţii îşi imaginau viitorul, şi mai important e să vedem care sunt constrângerile azi, de ce nu ne mai putem azi imagina anumite lucruri.
În cuvintele lui Quentin Skinner, nu e cazul să căutăm superioritatea imaginarului actual faţă de ce și-a imaginat umanitatea în timp şi față de aşa zisele naivităţi de altă dată, ci mai curând să vedem „ce constrângeri invizibile și nerecunoscute plasează societatea noastră asupra capacităţii noastre de a imagina” o altfel de lume am adăuga noi.
E nevoie de pozitivism pesimist
Haideţi să trecem rapid peste ultimele doua produse mari și somptuoase ale acestui an, Dune de Villeneuve, și Fundaţia produsă de Apple+. NU sunt pe lista de favorite, şi de aceea vrem şi noi să vedem alte lucruri decât clasici de acum 60 de ani, pentru că există o puzderie de romane SF fenomenale, la care nu mai ajungem din cauza marilor epopei din trecut care culeg toată atenţia şi bugetele. Mă refer aici la revoluția genului SF de operă spaţială – că e vorba de Elizabeth Bear, Iain M Banks, Peter Watts, Cixin Liu, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Kamerun Hurley, Tade Thompson, Nicky Drayden etc.
Aș putea spune că invariabil astăzi e nevoie de un anume pozitivism pesimist, adică pesimism în gândire, optimism în acţiune, un pic altceva decât pozitivismul logic, filozofia care s-a dorit hegemonică în ce priveşte ştiinţa. Atunci când avem de-a face cu ceva implicabil, ştiind ce ne aşteaptă în următoarul secol, SF-ul ne trafichează cu generozitate instrumente care ne situează în inima unor procese care par că ne depăşesc capacitatea de acţiune, gândire și simţire, făncându-ne părtăşi la o lume mai mare, şi participanţi în tot ce se întâmplă, până şi în felul sau tipul de SF pe care vom decide să îl actualizăm în comun.
Predicţia o situez tot ca o anti-predicţie pentru 2071, aș vrea să avem un Minister Întru Viitor cum sună titlul cărţii lui Kim Stanley Robinson, însă fără 30 de milioane de morți datorate unui val de căldură din ce ce în ce mai puternic situat în viitorul apropiat, asta dacă se poate.
TimeSpace Warps 
