2022: Futurity Now?
Futurity Now?
It is not so long ago that Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of My Life (2013), pronounced the “slow cancellation of the future.” Riffing on a phrase of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Fisher identifies a cultural inertia that resides in a collective inability to “grasp and articulate the present.” The ubiquity of capitalism – and of a capitalist realism that presumes there is no alternative to the neoliberal global order – has, Fisher argues, given rise to a condition in which “life continues, but time has stopped.” The “slow cancellation of the future” thus becomes, in Fisher’s hands, a critical expression of this insidious creep that gradually but relentlessly corrodes the social imagination – and with it, the radical potential of the future. As Wendy Brown describes it, this loss of futurity and of forward momentum “makes the weight of the present very heavy: all mass, no velocity.” Or “in the terms of late modern speediness … all speed, no direction.”
Is, then, the future over? Not quite. Indeed, there is no greater critical concern in the contemporary moment than the future, and recent years have seen a marked resurgence of thinking about futurity. Fired by the urgency of our current condition, writers, theorists, artists and activists have turned anew to consider the possibilities of the future, both as a subject of theorization and as an orientation for practice in the world.
Against this background, the Critical Times workshop proposes a multi- and interdisciplinary discussion around the topic of “Futurity Now?” A joint venture of seven international partner institutions on four continents, the workshop will offer a creative and stimulating space for exploring critical and theoretical perspectives on the future “as time, as event, as condition, as an orientation to the oncoming” (Saint-Amour). Focusing on different contexts, and drawing on diverse theoretical literatures, workshop sessions will ask and unpack such critical questions as:
- How can we reclaim futurity?
- Which practices, forms and strategies are available for making our present condition legible?
- What makes critique in “dark times” untimely and necessary? (Brown)
- Is there still a way of disentangling ourselves from the global order of capitalism and disarticulating the connections made by current forms of power?
- What alternative visions are possible for nurturing the desire for progressive change, for imagining law and politics otherwise?
- How might we cultivate a sense of the future that looks forward rather than back – “un avenir” that is, to speak with Derrida and Latour, “à-venir”?
This project is financially supported by Movetia. Movetia promotes exchange, mobility and cooperation within the fields of education, training and youth work – in Switzerland, Europe and worldwide. wwww.movetia.ch.
Programme & Workshop Details
The Futurity Now? workshop took place over three days, from 6 to 8 September 2022.
The programme is available for download here.
Recordings are available of the following sessions:
Colonial Legal Imaginaries / Southern Literary Futures(hosted by the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, ANU & the Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide)
Organizing the Future (Or: How to Demand a Million More Years?) (hosted by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies - lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne and the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne)
Organisation
The Futurity Now? workshop is organised by:
- Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies – lucernaiuris, University of Lucerne
- Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, The Australian National University
in association with
- Faculty of Law, University of Roma Tre
- Institute for International Law and the Humanities, University of Melbourne
- Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide
- Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia
- Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand
