Newsgroups: workspace.g-recycling_the_future,
workspace.recycling_the_future


previous    top    workgroup    thread    next


Subject: INTRODUCTION TO RECYCLING THE FUTURE
From: tomH <tibet@seconds.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 1997 00:34:07 METDST

* * * * *


Subject: INTRODUCTION TO RECYCLING THE FUTURE
From: Marieluise Angerer 106160.1045@compuserve.com
Forwarded by: tomH

----------------------------------------------------------------------
RECYCLING THE FUTURE / A PROJECT IN 4 EPISODES
http://thing.at/orfkunstradio/FUTURE/DX/
----------------------------------------------------------------------


WHEN TECHNOLOGY RESHAPES THE SUBJECT OR OTHER MODALITIES OF SUBJECTIVE
PRODUCTION

Compared to our more and more differentiated view of the past and its
histories, the future is always only projected as one future for all
of us, there are no futures. But why should there be only one and not
many of them for us?

This question raised by Zoe Sofoulis can be taken as a sort of
guideline for this newsgroup which accompanies the ongoing events of
"Recycling the Future" at the documenta X in Kassel, at the Ars
Electronica Festival'97 in Linz and in December at the Recycling the
Future symposium to be held at the ORF in Vienna.

It is no coincidence that the discussion about mankind«s future began
in the humanities and in art and less in natural sciences. The
discussion - what is a human being and where to draw the line against
other beings? - has been going on for 200 years, ever since the human
being made his/her first appearance in the field of the socalled
humanities. (Foucault!)

When Donna Haraway introduced her cyborg in the early 80s it was
exactly for proving this artificiality of differences, the difference
between the human being and the animal or other organism and that
between self-controlled, self-governing machines (automatons) and
organisms, especially humans (modes of autonomy). The cyborg is the
figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy and, as
Jennifer Gonz‡lez concludes, contains on its surface and in its
fundamental structure the multiple fears and desires of a culture
caught in the process of transformation.

What does this imply for Recycling the future? What is at stake are
the following asssumptions: The new technologies have introduced new
forms of production, new forms of reproduction - of recycling the
future. In taking up material of the past and present as "found
footage" the future is built up - not as totally different but as
slightly displaced, slightly unsettled, slightly disturbed.

It is this distortion and irritation which should dominate the
discourse concerning art and artist, product and author,
subjectivity/identity and materiality, aesthetic strategies and
political interventions, social responsibilities.


DIFFERENT MODES OF PRODUCTION: SUBJECT VERSUS UNCONSCIOUS STRUCTURES

Stanley Aronowitz among others has argued that the anti-human movement
commenced with the french theories of Lacan, LŽvy-Strauss, Althusser,
Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, etc. The structuralists and
poststructuralists were - according to Aronowitz - the first to
emphasize the priority of structures, systems, powers, forces, lines
etc. over human will, human agency, human soul and human
consciousness.

In many aspects, however, Aronowitz«s argument is missing the decisive
point. Namely, the anti-humanist and the anti-human movement
(posthuman, transhuman, extropian, etc.) are not not the same! Rather
into something else, as Michel Foucault suggested by ending his book,
'The Order of Things', asking: what else will be after the face of man
has disappeared as traces in the sand?

Recycling the future is thus about limitations, limitations of the
human being, technical limitations, cultural limitations which make it
impossible to think about the not-yet-knowable, but only leave
questions to be asked.

Or as FŽlix Guattari put it: The "unconscious figures of power and
knowledge are not universals. (...) In spite of that, other modalities
of subjective production are conceivable."