----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks, Renate, for asking me to elaborate on Jean-François Lyotard’s concerns
about the technological “pull of the future.” Before we transition into the
second week of our discussion, I might just clarify that Lyotard was concerned
about how the weight of the emergent digital age (he was writing about this in
the late 1980s and early 1990s) might impinge upon the plenitude of thinking
and experiencing life in any aquarian “now.”
Sounding the alarm over the degree of risk inherent in new digital
technologies, Lyotard notes that the transformation of the perceptual event by
the technical-industrial complex guarantees that the future won’t be what it
used to be. “As is clearly shown by the development of the techno-scientific
system, technology and the culture associated with it are under a necessity to
pursue their rise . . . The human race is, so to speak, “pulled forward” by
this process without possessing the slightest capacity for mastering it . . .
In as much as a monad in thus saturating its memory is stocking the future, the
present loses its privilege of being an ungraspable point from which, however,
time should always distribute itself between the “not yet” of the future and
the “no longer” of the past” (Lyotard, The Inhuman, 64-65). The pulling forward
of futurity, as evidenced by the economy of planned technological obsolescence,
thus depletes the magnetism of the present as the energetic and ungraspable
hinge between past and future. It is in the drive of this informatic pull of
the future that Bernard Stiegler, similarly, locates the highest degree of risk
in the rise of global media. At stake for him is the dissolution of the
plenitude of fiction and fantasy that might rewire the ontologies of
military-industrial-digital capitalism. Stiegler ushers the dire warning that
“the technical network of the production and diffusion of symbols produced for
a planetary industry [the system of téléaction] can overwhelm the universal
desire of fiction and at the same time condition the entire evolution of
humanity at the risk of exhausting its desire for fables” (Stiegler, Technics
and Time II, 30). In my forthcoming book, Technics Improvised, I wonder about
the impact of such a deadening profusion of planetary symbols and power
relations, contrary to the imaginary of any age of aquarius. When technology so
morphs into its own teleology, as the advance of a thoroughly predetermined
futurity of technology for technology’s sake, little space is left for fiction,
little possibility for speculative imagination, little space for the joys of
thinking the future otherwise.
Thanks for introducing what looks like a creative month on -empyre-.
Best to all as we welcome the arrival of warmer temperatures in Ithaca this
week.
Tim
Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu<http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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