2015 and 2058
Oct. 17th, 2008 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusBack in Berlin after my three days in London, I've reported on the Frieze Art Fair opening for The Post-Materialist, contrasting the dandy fizz of Wednesday night's VIP party with the menace of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's new installation in the turbine hall at Tate Modern, TH. 2058. That piece imagines a disaster-stricken London in 2058, menaced by Louise Bourgeois' spider and other spectres.
An article I wrote last week for a special issue of Moscow magazine BG (BG stands for Bolshoi Gorod, which means Big City) has just gone online. I was asked my predictions about life in 2015. Since the article appears in the magazine only in Russian, I'm putting the English version here. It was quite a difficult commission, because 2015 is in a kind of "uncanny valley" relationship to 2008, neither far enough away for us to be able to say anything (because if you look far enough into the future pretty much everything that can be true will be true) nor near enough to us to be exactly like today.
Uncanny Culture
Bolshoi Gorod magazine, Moscow
October 2008
2015 is a difficult date to predict. It's not so far into the future
that we can use it as a Rorschach blot for elaborate futuristic
projections (utopian or dystopian), not so close that we can say --
based on what's happening now -- exactly what it will be like. In
robotics they speak of the "uncanny valley" -- the anxious, slightly
nauseous moment when a robot is improved to the point at which it's
suddenly neither robot nor human, but something unsettlingly poised
between the two. 2015 is an "uncanny" date in this sense; it is
neither going to be unlike what we see today, nor like it. To imagine
it makes us shiver slightly.
To get a sense of this awkward distance in time, I need to think back
to the year as far behind us as 2015 is ahead: 2001. I need to think
about what it felt like for me. In that year I released an album of
"laptop Americana" called Folktronic. One of its subjects was the dot
com bubble burst I'd witnessed at firsthand in New York in 2000; I
imagined Appalachian hillbillies with Casios, employed as web
designers. It was a topical anachronism at the time, but now it would
just be an anachronism; the "freak folk" scene of the noughties (think
of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Cocorosie and hundreds of others)
has more or less run its course by 2008. And I doubt the Flash media
files of dancing hillbillies I exhibited in a New York gallery back
then would even play on today's computers. If they did, they would
look dated -- full of 1990s-style irony and heavy-handed
postmodernism.
Ah, postmodernism! There's something that's gone out of date in the last seven years, for a start. The binary collapses executed strategically by postmodernism (the collapse of high and low culture, past and present, local and global) are, by 2008, boring us to death. We're thoroughly sick of art which appropriates popular culture, of meta-layering and shallow, reflexive irony, of pastiche and of the mapping of museum to supermarket and supermarket to museum. Philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have proposed forms of neo-foundationalism, austerity, even collectivist authoritarianism as ways beyond postmodernism's banal ouroborosity (the ouroboros -- the snake that eats its own tail -- is the perfect symbol of postmodernism's unbearable reflexivity, and the choking it provokes).
In the art world there have been attempts recently to escape
postmodern banality by reviving eclecticism and Modernism (Documenta
12 was a pivotal show in this respect). But shows like Documenta,
quiet, quirky, academic and neo-Modernist, fail in two respects:
they don't entirely escape postmodernism (which after all loves to
revive, pastiche, devour and vomit out again all former styles). And
they take their place in an annual cycle of biennials which endlessly
"interrogate" or "dialogue with" globalization as theme, and gaze
guiltily at "the Other".
In other words, they are still anchored in a unipolar and imperial
cultural model rooted in the 1990s, a model in which the US and Europe
consume, either guiltily or admiringly, the rest of the world's
culture, and in which globalization happens, by and large, for their
benefit. I call this the Andreas Gursky model, after the photographer
who best captures the 1990s idea of globalization.
But it's now becoming clear that 2015 will not be so much about
globalization in the sense in which Fareed Zakaria describes it in his
book "The Post-American World": "Generations from now," Zakaria wrote,
"when historians write about these times, they might note that by the
turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its
great, historical mission—globalizing the world." That's a peculiar
construction; why did it take America to "globalize the globe"? Surely
the globe was already global?
I think by 2015 the US will have declined sufficiently (economically,
militarily and culturally) for us to see that there is a difference
between globalization and globe -- between, in other words, a world in
which an array of colourful "Others" are arranged around a central
"sole remaining superpower", and a world in which the Others relate to
each other on equal terms, and don't worry so much about how they're
represented. There will be a clear shift, in other words, from
monopolarity to multipolarity; from what, in the airline business,
they call the hub-and-spoke model to the point-to-point model.
What that means, in cultural terms, is that there will be a net
decline in orientalism (the Magic Realism and World Theatre of the
1980s, for instance, or the constant "dialogue with the Other" seen in
today's art biennials), and a net increase in point-to-point
conversation which cuts out the middle man, the arbitrator, the hub,
which is, in most cases today, the United States and Europe. Instead,
aided by increasingly sophisticated digital translation tools, there
will be, by 2015, a many-to-many culture, a point-to-point culture.
The digital will continue to make old media irrelevant: CD albums,
paper books, newspapers and magazines, public cinemas will all more or
less disappear, except for peripheral retro-fetishistic enclaves (like
the flourishing vinyl fetish). Physical goods will circulate less,
while intellectual goods circulate more and more freely. Copyright as
we know it will die. National television and radio will also melt away
after a series of crises. Media which bring people physically
together, on the other hand, will flourish -- ephemeral performative
arts like live music, theatre and dance have a strong future. People
don't want to spend all their time online, after all.
More spontaneous actions like flash mobbing will develop, and cities
will become backdrops for ludic "urban exploration" and "pervasive
urban gaming". Some of these new "disorienteering sports" (the
"ostranenie" of Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky
mapped to the "derive" of Situationists Guy Debord and Michel de
Certeau) will be organized by city mayors as part of local tourism
initiatives. Others will be more dangerous and unpredictable, shading
into terrorism, autonomy, and micro-revolution.
At the same time, people will travel less as oil costs increase and
travel is seen as environmentally unacceptable. So the point-to-point
global dialogue will happen mostly in the digital realm, whereas the
performative boom will be a local one, centred on particular cities.
We will see cities become semi-autonomous, as they were in renaissance
Italy. (Some may, alas, need fortified city walls.)
Steep increases in basic commodity and transport costs will make
people adopt more austere and self-sustaining lifestyles, the kind
once called "post-materialist". There will be general exhaustion with
the old consumer capitalist tension between haves and have-nots,
between boom and bust, between anorexia and bulimia. Instead, modest,
simple lives organized around local barter, community arts, and
self-sustainability will become the ideal, although people may well be
inspired by models on the far side of the world.
Just as we'll see a return to Renaissance-style semi-autonomous
cities, I think we'll see the re-emergence of the "Renaissance Man" --
an all-rounder who can bake bread, edit films, code for the web, write
poetry, eat fire, and cook home-grown vegetables for twenty friends
and neighbours. As the mist clears on the "uncanny valley" of 2015,
what emerges is not a robot, but Leonardo da Vinci.
An article I wrote last week for a special issue of Moscow magazine BG (BG stands for Bolshoi Gorod, which means Big City) has just gone online. I was asked my predictions about life in 2015. Since the article appears in the magazine only in Russian, I'm putting the English version here. It was quite a difficult commission, because 2015 is in a kind of "uncanny valley" relationship to 2008, neither far enough away for us to be able to say anything (because if you look far enough into the future pretty much everything that can be true will be true) nor near enough to us to be exactly like today.
Uncanny CultureBolshoi Gorod magazine, Moscow
October 2008
2015 is a difficult date to predict. It's not so far into the future
that we can use it as a Rorschach blot for elaborate futuristic
projections (utopian or dystopian), not so close that we can say --
based on what's happening now -- exactly what it will be like. In
robotics they speak of the "uncanny valley" -- the anxious, slightly
nauseous moment when a robot is improved to the point at which it's
suddenly neither robot nor human, but something unsettlingly poised
between the two. 2015 is an "uncanny" date in this sense; it is
neither going to be unlike what we see today, nor like it. To imagine
it makes us shiver slightly.
To get a sense of this awkward distance in time, I need to think back
to the year as far behind us as 2015 is ahead: 2001. I need to think
about what it felt like for me. In that year I released an album of
"laptop Americana" called Folktronic. One of its subjects was the dot
com bubble burst I'd witnessed at firsthand in New York in 2000; I
imagined Appalachian hillbillies with Casios, employed as web
designers. It was a topical anachronism at the time, but now it would
just be an anachronism; the "freak folk" scene of the noughties (think
of Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Cocorosie and hundreds of others)
has more or less run its course by 2008. And I doubt the Flash media
files of dancing hillbillies I exhibited in a New York gallery back
then would even play on today's computers. If they did, they would
look dated -- full of 1990s-style irony and heavy-handed
postmodernism.
Ah, postmodernism! There's something that's gone out of date in the last seven years, for a start. The binary collapses executed strategically by postmodernism (the collapse of high and low culture, past and present, local and global) are, by 2008, boring us to death. We're thoroughly sick of art which appropriates popular culture, of meta-layering and shallow, reflexive irony, of pastiche and of the mapping of museum to supermarket and supermarket to museum. Philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have proposed forms of neo-foundationalism, austerity, even collectivist authoritarianism as ways beyond postmodernism's banal ouroborosity (the ouroboros -- the snake that eats its own tail -- is the perfect symbol of postmodernism's unbearable reflexivity, and the choking it provokes).In the art world there have been attempts recently to escape
postmodern banality by reviving eclecticism and Modernism (Documenta
12 was a pivotal show in this respect). But shows like Documenta,
quiet, quirky, academic and neo-Modernist, fail in two respects:
they don't entirely escape postmodernism (which after all loves to
revive, pastiche, devour and vomit out again all former styles). And
they take their place in an annual cycle of biennials which endlessly
"interrogate" or "dialogue with" globalization as theme, and gaze
guiltily at "the Other".
In other words, they are still anchored in a unipolar and imperial
cultural model rooted in the 1990s, a model in which the US and Europe
consume, either guiltily or admiringly, the rest of the world's
culture, and in which globalization happens, by and large, for their
benefit. I call this the Andreas Gursky model, after the photographer
who best captures the 1990s idea of globalization.
But it's now becoming clear that 2015 will not be so much about
globalization in the sense in which Fareed Zakaria describes it in his
book "The Post-American World": "Generations from now," Zakaria wrote,
"when historians write about these times, they might note that by the
turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its
great, historical mission—globalizing the world." That's a peculiar
construction; why did it take America to "globalize the globe"? Surely
the globe was already global?
I think by 2015 the US will have declined sufficiently (economically,
militarily and culturally) for us to see that there is a difference
between globalization and globe -- between, in other words, a world in
which an array of colourful "Others" are arranged around a central
"sole remaining superpower", and a world in which the Others relate to
each other on equal terms, and don't worry so much about how they're
represented. There will be a clear shift, in other words, from
monopolarity to multipolarity; from what, in the airline business,
they call the hub-and-spoke model to the point-to-point model.
What that means, in cultural terms, is that there will be a net
decline in orientalism (the Magic Realism and World Theatre of the
1980s, for instance, or the constant "dialogue with the Other" seen in
today's art biennials), and a net increase in point-to-point
conversation which cuts out the middle man, the arbitrator, the hub,
which is, in most cases today, the United States and Europe. Instead,
aided by increasingly sophisticated digital translation tools, there
will be, by 2015, a many-to-many culture, a point-to-point culture.
The digital will continue to make old media irrelevant: CD albums,
paper books, newspapers and magazines, public cinemas will all more or
less disappear, except for peripheral retro-fetishistic enclaves (like
the flourishing vinyl fetish). Physical goods will circulate less,
while intellectual goods circulate more and more freely. Copyright as
we know it will die. National television and radio will also melt away
after a series of crises. Media which bring people physically
together, on the other hand, will flourish -- ephemeral performative
arts like live music, theatre and dance have a strong future. People
don't want to spend all their time online, after all.
More spontaneous actions like flash mobbing will develop, and cities
will become backdrops for ludic "urban exploration" and "pervasive
urban gaming". Some of these new "disorienteering sports" (the
"ostranenie" of Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky
mapped to the "derive" of Situationists Guy Debord and Michel de
Certeau) will be organized by city mayors as part of local tourism
initiatives. Others will be more dangerous and unpredictable, shading
into terrorism, autonomy, and micro-revolution.
At the same time, people will travel less as oil costs increase and
travel is seen as environmentally unacceptable. So the point-to-point
global dialogue will happen mostly in the digital realm, whereas the
performative boom will be a local one, centred on particular cities.
We will see cities become semi-autonomous, as they were in renaissance
Italy. (Some may, alas, need fortified city walls.)
Steep increases in basic commodity and transport costs will make
people adopt more austere and self-sustaining lifestyles, the kind
once called "post-materialist". There will be general exhaustion with
the old consumer capitalist tension between haves and have-nots,
between boom and bust, between anorexia and bulimia. Instead, modest,
simple lives organized around local barter, community arts, and
self-sustainability will become the ideal, although people may well be
inspired by models on the far side of the world.
Just as we'll see a return to Renaissance-style semi-autonomous
cities, I think we'll see the re-emergence of the "Renaissance Man" --
an all-rounder who can bake bread, edit films, code for the web, write
poetry, eat fire, and cook home-grown vegetables for twenty friends
and neighbours. As the mist clears on the "uncanny valley" of 2015,
what emerges is not a robot, but Leonardo da Vinci.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 06:36 am (UTC)postmodern banality by reviving eclecticism and Modernism"
I'm not entirely sure this is a good thing, because in order to "escape postmodernism" we're going to need to see a revival of the stifling influence of cultural elitism which art (and the wider world even) has only just recently (relatively speaking) cast off.
There was a fantastic series broadcast on BBC4 called Children's TV on Trial (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/features/childrens-tv.shtml) which took a look at how social trends from the 1950s to the 1990s affected the niche of children's television (for those in the UK reading this, you can watch the series on BBC iPlayer)
In a nutshell - 1950/1960s BBC was extremely smug, middle-class, erudite and incredibly pleased with itself. It saw itself as the arbiter of culture to the masses and as such didn't represent Britain's diversity beyond what the BBC thought Britain should aspire to be, or capture the the British children's interest. During the 1970's this slowly had to change because of the introduction of ITV, which was (and still is) a commercial channel and relied on appealing to the masses to garner revenue; it gave the public exactly what it wanted. The BBC gave the British what it thought it needed, and slowly started losing its audiences because of this.
A prominent example; whilst ITV were importing fast-paced, violent Cowboy & Indian shows from the US, the BBC was importing a bizarre Arty drama from communist East Germany called "The Singing, Ringing Tree".
I have to admit, I found 1950/60/70's BBC incredibly interesting and captivating, and longed for it even compared to what the BBC has become today, but that sort of shift backwards will come at a heavy price, one I'm not sure I would be prepared to pay. We'll have to re-welcome cultural elitism to get from postmodernism to "Modernism 2.0" and that's not acceptable to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 06:47 am (UTC)Secondly, I'd say that to think that what we have now -- I'll just sum it up with the word Endemol -- is not elitism is a mistake. It's elitist as hell, but just disguises its top-down message in "ordinary people" acting in certain ways. What it isn't, though, is good elitism, elitism that transmits useful or enlightened values or information. I would back the good elitism of Lord Reith any day over the bad elitism of, you know, Big Brother and Chris Evans.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 07:45 am (UTC)What was the driving force behind the BBC in the 1950s? What the educated few thought the British should aspire to be culturally? The middle classes as the shepards of the lower classes?
Sure, it's fantastic for "otherness", but that sort of cultural environment is a breeding ground for narrow-mindedness which can be toxic.
In the 60 and 70s there was a struggle for a more subjective view of culture, free from what the establishment thought society should be, The sexual revolution being a prime example. The establishment thought its family values model was what would be most "useful" and beneficial for society, but it wasn't what people wanted.
Who gets to decide what counts as useful or enlightened values? this is the real question. I attended your lecture (it was enjoyable and thought provoking) and you touched upon these very issues, in fact, the very first question you were asked right after the lecture was "but how do you prevent old-school elitism?" showing you just how worried people are about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 09:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 10:22 am (UTC)I think modern TV (or bittorrent downloaded whatever) is a mix, with some rubbish and some great shows. We forget the dreadful game shows of our childhood, and just remember the excellent documentaries and druggy children's shows!
A patrician, top-down, state-funded arts scene is often less vital than the rough and tumble of the best commercial shows. An example. Sir David Hare writes plays for the National Theatre which supposedly interrogate the political issues of the day. The results are tedious. South Park does the same thing in a tight 20-minute format, and the results are brilliant. The episode "Best Friends Forever" is a virtuoso piece of writing, tackling all sides in the Terry Schiavo case quite superbly.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 11:34 am (UTC)And this is something that came up in a question at the end of the lecture -- I said I still believe in the avant garde, and reject the usual objection that "these days it just takes five minutes for an avant garde idea to turn up in a TV commercial". If an idea can be framed in a TV commercial, it probably isn't avant garde enough. An idea must really be, in a way, unthinkable and "wrong" to be avant garde, and therefore be totally unsuited to popular culture, which is all about repetition of the previously-right. You could wait a thousand years for certain avant garde ideas to turn up in popular culture and they never would. Political ideas, formal ideas, things too gentle and subtle and quiet and strange. In fact, this is one reason why there's a turn away from commercial culture in the so-called Altermodern. A lot of the art we're seeing is concentrating on doing things only art can do. Like get very slow, very small, very quiet, when commercial culture tends to the fast, the big and the loud.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 12:48 pm (UTC)I really miss Lindsay Anderson, who was, in his way, the best of Hare and South Park. "O Lucky Man" refers to Candide, the Pilgrim's Progress, and Brecht, yet it also refers to the pop TV of the day. But it's not just about "referencing" things. Anderson had something to say.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 02:31 pm (UTC)Is it?
How do shows with large audiences that are "axed" to allow for others that cater to lower common denominators figure in the simple equation?
Nettles and orchids planted in the same plot won't produce a mixed shrubbery, it will produce a plot full of nettles.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 02:49 pm (UTC)But my point is that the portraying of culture as a level playing field is akin to the blindness that produced the current economic crisis.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 11:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 07:07 am (UTC)For example, most art I've seen (even art I love) is not self-contained - what you see is not what you get. You need to read the label to find out what it is made of (like cheery wood harvested from an endangered forest by an endangered tribe or some such) and how the whole work relates to a particular concept or theory du jour (like yet another ill advised 'commentary' on 'relational aesthetics').
Post-modernism has NEVER been populist; it only 'appropriates' and 'comments' on popular culture, but always for a specific and tiny audience. I mean, think of all those critical media studies and their willful embrace of obtuse academia. I love Derrida and Deleuze as much as the next person, but the use of terms like phallogocentrism and deterritorialization should be rare, at best.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 11:41 am (UTC)But I quite agree that regurgitating old theory as a kind of lazy legitimation happens too much, and takes us nowhere fresh. Artists have to make their own worlds, but they can often do that in very intuitive ways, working closely with their materials, following hunches, being stubborn and perverse.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 02:17 pm (UTC)