Backwards into the Future: Welcome to the Final Show

Starting Coordinates: February 13, 2021. East Garfield Park, Chicago, IL, USA 6:51PM CST. Waxing Crescent, 3 days old. Aquarius.

”[Posthumans] if you want to realize yourselves-you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval-all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go […].” [Mina Loy, 1914] [1].

I was gifted the experience of hearing Barry Sanders give a presentation at the What is Life? conference at the University of Oregon in March 2017. In a riveting speech on the effects of media and advertising on human subjectivity he proclaimed, “We have become mummified." A mummy is a dead human or an animal whose soft tissues and organs have been preserved. What does it mean to be dead yet preserved? What has died and what has been/is being preserved? McDonald’s commercials feed us family values while Instagram up-sells our new lifestyle. Virtual education, through two dimensional pixelated rectangles, (muted and hiding), replaces human intelligence and I am left drawing it out of them, trying to reach them with all the urgency of the future, rushing towards the finish line, because they are the ones who can still be taught. Because we are receding, and to recede is to gradually diminish. There is no pain. You are receding. [Pink Floyd]

V. is concerned that we are losing our authenticity, as Tik Tok reorganizes the speech patterns of her friend. K. tells me of the post-truth predicament in which we no longer question authenticity, but passively receive data through media channels whipping past at 5G high speed. Incorporating a continuous feed of information and noise into our troubled depleted systems makes for a bad feedback loop. What is the message that is coming through and how can we ‘see’ the message? How fast must it go before we understand that there is no going back, or worse, that we have gone too far? What are the stakes in the development and deployment of artificial intelligences when we have lost our natural intelligences? What does it mean to dream anymore, those of us who have had our dreams stolen and replaced with the dreams of the marketing ploys which ploy us to get more. The question of getting more in order to get at our desire for being more is the false problem of the times. The “sign of the times” then, is the broken chain of signifiers in which the significations have all but hijacked the flows of free desire, the capacity for unleashing the flows of desire that make humans a magic creation. Without desire there is no vision and without vision there is no action and without action there can be no creation.

The formulation of the correct question is far more valuable than the seeking of an answer to a false problem. We must learn to differentiate between true and false problems. Is it a difference in kind or in degree? To what degree are we aware of the differences in kind we perpetuate regarding that-which/those-that we scrutinize, criticize, and dismiss? Such articulations are crucial operations in the fine tuning of the quality of our own human consciousness. New form irritates consciousness until consciousness expands [Mina Loy]. We should not be concerned with ‘dodging the bullets’ of such irritations. Let us become more concerned with cultivating the “ABILITY TO EXTEND TOWARDS and in proximity WITH OTHERS, so that we can take in and on more of the world” [Braidotti].

In other words it is time to “UNSCREW your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of Life—Whole” [Mina Loy]. And for that matter, sufferings should not be feared. They are a pathway forward, an avenue towards something and into something else. Such transversals are necessary and needed. They are mappings leading to elsewhere [Ursala Le Guin].

It is not a representation of a life that we are living. It is life-in-itself. The task is advancing theories and practices that provoke experiences for the accumulating of the necessary intensities which, added up, make us more than what we think we knew we already were, so that we may expand to becoming that which we are hopeful to Be. Why do we choose to not move? To not become moved? Because new territories demand an alteration in consciousness: “CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it” [Mina Loy]. Expansions are stretchings and stretchings hurt. “All entities move, nothing remains still.” [Heraclitis] or: “Stand still and perish” [Braidotti]. 

This writing is one stepping stone of creative exploration for understanding the road ahead that is winding a pathway to elsewhere. Utopias are imagined elsewheres. Atlantis is submerged in its myth of drowning. Myths have all but drowned in the subversions of histories and of history-writings [Sanders]. Mythic tales are maps, guideposts, sacred-symbols that must be resuscitated for clear understandings of those futures-past, those past-futures. ‘History is an angel being blown backwards into the future’ [Laurie Anderson]. We must go backwards to find that which has been lost and, since the operational definition of time does not address what the fundamental nature of it is, we are not tied to it as linear and forward moving. From chronos to kairos, quantity to quality, from straight ahead to when the time is ripe.

We must pull the future forward, into the present, through the conscious practice of our collective-creative imaginings. We must begin to imagine again and we must begin to imagine better. What are the stakes in continuing imaginings the way they are occurring today? They occur not as consenting visions of a shared humanity, but as singular nodes dispersed into the culture-currents of our collective psyche, and they operate at the level of lack. Lack is the absence or deficiency of something. And where there is no lack, a lack is created. How does an advertising campaign operate? It operates on the kitsch methodology that invoking a shared emotion will bond the receiver to a product and, through repetition, will inspire action, not to create, but to fill a newly formed lack. We must begin to weed our gardens of such undesirabilities. We must be able to identify and distinguish between what is and what is not desirable, between true and false problems.

The stakes are in the quality of our consciousness. Because the things we imagine are the things we create.

Notes:

1. Loy, Mina. 1914. Feminist Manifesto. “Posthuman” is my replacement word for “Women” as written in the original text. doi: https://oncomouse.github.io/loy/feminist.html

2. Sanders, Barry. 2017. “The Coming Prehuman (A Peculiar Relation to Life and Life-Time): Two Perspectives”. What is Life? conference. University of Oregon. Portland, OR. Full Program: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/whatislife/program/

3. Braidotti, Rosi. 2020. Quote from lecture during Summer Seminar “Posthuman Convergences”. Utrecht University.

4. Anderson, Laurie. 1989. The Dream Before. From Strange Angels, Warner Records Inc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGL2Ne0V9mI

5. Heraclitus. 1826. "Cratylus". Dialogue by Plato. doi:

6. Le Guin, Ursala. 1983. Inside Elsewhere. NY Times. doi: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1983/05/22/175520.html#