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lecture 2nd term

sries 2. 1 Post contemporary

futurity.

nick srnicek: post capitalist temporalities


futures
inventing the future (postcapitalism and a world without work)
take a view from the left to change the political landscape of the pesent
what does the future means today
TIME talking, its hard talking about it
IDEA OF NO FUTURE (contemporary condition)
our world changes rapidly, but there sems to be no idea f the future.
-Francis Fukuyama “The end of history and the last man”
-liberal democracy (global democracy)
-individual human rights (ways in whichw we organise our societies)
-capitalism
(it doesnt mean that things dont change but the fundamental coordinators of our social reality will
stay the same)
MELANCHOLY AND DEFEAT:
Franco Berardi Bifo (massive depressive) “After the future”
- the invisible committee: “The future has no future
- Simon Critchley: we have to resist the idea and ideology of the future
-
think the future from within late capitalism
-from a phenomenological sense of a rapidly changing world (what we feel in the
-historical sense of time having stopped

book “Futures Past on the semantics of historical times”- reinhart koselleck


-The space of experience (the incorporation of the past into the present)\
The horizon of expectation (the future experiences as a repository of expectations)

Pre-Modern era
-experience aligns with expectations
-time is circular (evverything in everyday life is alligned with a prediction of cycles )

_Eschatological endpoint (history oriented towards an apocaliptic endpoint), enforced by the


church

Modern era:
disruption and domestication of the future
new image of historical time: the future is not about the end times anymore , the future is going to
be different and better, created a separation between experience and expectation (disjuncture)
DOMESTICATION: narratives of progress:
-Hegel
-Marx
_Eurocentrism (this ideas are constructed within europe)
-Capitalism (it is the way to move forward from older systems)
idea of history as a progression towards absolute knowledge

philosophically:
NO PROGRESS , 1970 onwards, ideas of progress start being critisized (after holocaust)
images of progress relate to sth traumatic, what was it in those ideas of progress that enabled the
holocaust to emerge
-direction to history
-no teleology
-No progress
-The image of the future becomes empty (derrida)
All the stories about the future and progress are all illusions.
(LYOTARD)
the angel of history swept forward and facing backwards towards he past
theres still a sense that we are moving forward, but not necessarily to anything better (derrida).

politically:
there are people criticising ideas of progress:
-underdevelopment (constructed by capitalism as to mantain certain conditions of opression and
exploitation, rich countries use cheap labour )
-Decolonisation movement

-Singular image of progress fragments into multiple images of the future

|NO PROGRESS? but capitalism has won… “


everything ends towards capitalism

capitalist progress
what does it mean to say that capitalism has won
capitalist image of pregress

CAPITALIST TEMPORALITY
there is no image of progress in capitalism
no eschatological image of the future
the future has been cancelled
eternal present

FREDERIC JAMESON:
“It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”
capitalism, the eternal present
the repetition again and again of the cycle of creating value
break past the cycle

POSTCAPITALIS TEMPORALITIES

-reject the inevitability of progress -? hyperstitional (the future is not sth to be waited for, nothing
that is passively received, the future is an active force within the present) ccru , the future coming
into he present the force of time, what propels us forward . we have to be active, think about
constructing the future in the present, it rejects any idea of unnecessary future
“What will have been”
the present is posited as the past of a future present
we cant have a blue print for the future

-reject a transcendent perspective on history (trascendence perspective of history would be like


someone standing on top of a map, having an absolute perspective) -> navigational
spatial analogy , micronesia, navigation between island without gps / no absolute perspective—>
they have the localised perspective
AN IMMANENT PERSPECTIVE

dynamic set of coordinates for guidance

-Break through capitalist accumulation (breakthrough the eternal present) -> acceleration
phenomenological time: increased speed
historical time:static
TO ACCELERATE MEANS TO BREAK OUT OF HISTORICAL STASIS

capitalist temporality: a braindead repetition of capitalist accumulation

POSTCAPITALIST TEMPORALITY:
-The acceleration of historical time
-an immanent navigation of history to replace the transcendence perspective
-a hypersitional force, to replace the dogma of historical necessity

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